I.

It was a day in January 2021. A young man threw himself to death from the top of the Vessel at the heart of Hudson Yards in Manhattan. It was already the third suicide that had occurred in the year since it had opened to the public in February 2020. Its unique spiral staircases designed by a British architect Thomas Heatherwick, had successfully drawn not only a lot of visitors, media attention but also a handful of frustrated people. This story is not about the idiosyncrasies of any specific architecture or place. If one had to narrow down and focus on any of them, no one would be able to take any breath in the city filled with such meaningless quirks. To live side by side, it is important to not question any causality and to carve the quote by George Bernard Shaw; ‘If you can't get rid of the skeleton in the closet, you better teach it to dance.’ But not everyone seemed to share the same way to dance with it. Here was a young woman who was surprised that only three people had succeeded so far to commit suicide from that banal skeleton. She assumed that there might have been more trials and wanted to calculate the probability of success. She had her own ways of appreciating the architecture and she wondered: if you dropped a ball from the highest point and watched it roll to the lowest point in the building, what kind of trajectory would it take, and how many possible trajectories would it have? ‘Start with Pascal’s triangle[1],’ she mumbled. What makes her stick to this childish play was an effort to get away from the worst scenario that she could do as the three people had done.

‘Probability is just predictable delusion,’ she thought. Once she was done with playing the calculation of the ball’s trajectories, she deconstructed the giant sculpture into small parts and picked one of the nodes away and put it in another place and saw how this change could create a different number of cases of trajectories that her tiny ball could trace. ‘Things only deviate from their planned trajectories when something exceptional happens.’ Her ritual became the best way of suppressing her urge of cramming her head under the wheel of a moving vehicle. In the midst of this delirious city, staying sane may be less possible than any chance that lottery roulettes remember its previous number. The dysfunctional relationship between the city and her would last as long as she grasped a tiny glass bottle of alprazolam in her left hand.

As a 28-year-old data analyst, the eldest daughter of poor immigrant parents, she had been an object of envy for young women of color especially in the finance industry that was well-known as a frenzied and male-dominated field. It would be hard to understand the suffocating amount of pressure she was under just from reading a short description of her above. It might amount to the number of doses that she should take to ease her occasional panic attack. Of course, she wasn’t born anxious; nobody is. There had been a time when she was confident that her success wholly rested on her own effort. Through a few trivial experiences, however, she had begun to realize that all her achievements were owed to unpredictable fortune; when she noticed an Uber Eats guy delivering her pizza was her secondary school friend who had sat next to her in class, she couldn’t stop thinking that she might have lived his life if she hadn’t grasped just one inch of fortune.

Such delusional thoughts had strenuously seized upon her mind and ended up bringing her the extreme level of anxiety. At first, she simply predicted a unidimensional result that her decisions could bring. But soon, she fell into the endless chain of thousands of possible scenarios that one single decision would bring about into her life. In the end, it completely paralyzed her and made her unable to choose which kind of cream cheese she wanted to eat with her bagel. Someone would ask; who on earth doesn’t suffer from such difficulties of making decisions in this unprecedented era of uncertainty? While the oracles of modern age have prophesied a brand-new motto ‘Seize the moment and enjoy your life’, people are grappling with creating new strategies against their notorious common enemy—the future. To make matters worse, what she had to predict was not only her own life but also the trends of the next quarter with a tremendous number of data points. When the symptoms had appeared on surface and gone beyond her ability to control, she was prescribed medicine in an attempt to hide symptoms in a workplace which was already ready to replace her with someone else if her performance today didn’t improve from that of yesterday.


II.

Getting off at 25th street, she walked into a building opposite the bus stop. An elevator door opened, and she saw the letters ‘Dr, Roberta Brown,’ which were engraved on the upper-middle part of the door. A buzzing sound came out through the slightly open door. She carefully put one step into the room, intentionally creating a tiny amount of noise so that whoever was would notice her. Upon entering the room, the scorching sunlight pierced her eyes, and blinded her in an instant. When her eyesight slowly came back, what she could at first see was a cloud of randomly floating dust. After a few blinks, her gaze was drawn to one painting hung on one side of the walls. The painting was filled with black straight lines leaving very thin white space in-between. It was the painting by Frank Stella, ‘The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II.’ But she couldn’t feel the resonance that the volume of texture in the original piece had given to her at the MoMA. ‘It could never be the same as the original,’ she thought.

“They are not technically random but random enough to seem beautiful.”
She was startled by a stranger’s voice behind her.


“Oh, I thought you were staring at dust haunting the window,” a stranger said.
A middle-aged woman in a white gown walked around her and sat at her desk.
“Hello, I’m Roberta. I’m a senior researcher from the federal research center of neuroscience. I just got off a call with your doctor, Dr. Jermaine, who coincidentally is also my friend. You’ve already heard why he sent you to me, haven’t you?”
When the doctor asked, she then realized that she had barely paid attention to what her doctor said over the period of her treatment.
“Well, isn’t it because my illness is getting much worse than what he can handle? So, he sent me to you for extended treatment,” she replied evasively.

Flipping the pages of her chart, the doctor said,
“According to your chart that Dr. Jermaine gave me, the cause of your anxiety disorder is actually nothing extraordinary in any kinds of modern mental illness, which is your excessive worries over your career, your life, and your future. Unfortunately, these sufferings are inevitable for everyone in the world where we have to make more than one hundred decisions every hour. I’m also one of them.”

She didn’t hate the doctor’s gentle, calm voice even though what the doctor was saying was the cliché of the description about the anxiety disorder. She got bored and glanced at the clock on the desk. It said ten to three.
‘Will I be able to get back to the office before 4 pm?’ she asked herself. This is because trading in the U.S. stock market was only available until 4 pm. Her hands under the desk repeatedly refreshed the Reddit group ‘r/wallstreetbets[2]’ on her phone. Although she was not able to see the screen entirely, she noticed that it was a moment that she had to switch the screen from Reddit to Robinhood—one of the biggest stock market apps—to track the chart of GameStop stock. When she had last seen it, it had had an unprecedented surge, up to 43% compared to the announcement of last Friday. The chart had gone up and down in a bewildering manner every second. None of traders predicted that the value of the offline videogame franchise could surpass that of any vaccine companies during the pandemic.

‘Such a crazy and ridiculous world,’ she thought.
‘Who had ever cared about this declining business?’
‘Wait, I guess somebody tipped me off about ‘the short squeeze’ last month. Who was it?’
When she began to think that this could be an ominous sign that would end up causing the second Lehman Brothers Collapse in 2008, the woman’s voice jumped into the train of her thoughts.

“…As I explained, the recent treatment has been focused on helping people learn how to embrace uncertainty as part of our lives rather than denying and getting rid of it. This method will work efficiently because in the future, making decisions will be trickier than it is now. So, what we are doing is helping those who are grappling with adapting to the heavy load of uncertainty.”
When the doctor finished speaking, she became very upset at the doctor’s words; they made it sound as if she had certainly failed to manage her life.
“It sounds like you planned a new treatment. I’m sorry. I didn’t come here to be a lab rat for your experiment,” she said bluntly seeking a good moment to leave the office.
“We won’t give you treatment. We offer you a trade.”
“Tra… What?”
In a moment, she was confused by the word because this was more likely to be said in her office, not in a hospital or any place focusing on mental health.

“I’ll buy your anxious mind, then give you something with comparable worth, such as the power over uncertainty?”


III.

The doctor’s startling suggestion piqued her interest immediately. But she quickly became disconcerted, realizing how preposterous it was. However, there was no doubt that what the doctor said sounded way more ridiculous than what was happening on the stock market at the time. Her index finger lightly pressed the power button on the right side of her phone to power off.


The doctor kept talking, “My research team has focused on how human minds obsess over uncertainty and how that obsession could reinforce the safety and certainty of someone’s life. With that information, we have devised a method so that we could make better use of uncertainty in an efficient way to guarantee the certainty of future events… which is generating Randomness in your life.”

This might be the most absurd thing that she had ever heard.
“Okay, you didn’t expect me to understand it just from what you’ve said. Here’s my response. First of all, what I need in my life is ‘order’, not ‘randomness’. Secondly, how could it be that what offsets uncertainty is randomness? Isn’t randomness a nuisance creating chaos and fortifying uncertainty? And most importantly, here’s the thing: my life is already uncontrollable and so much complicated by a lot of arbitrary things,” she continued talking. But she was a bit agitated and had already forgotten about the GameStop frenzy.
“Like you said, let’s assume my anxiety can generate a certain quality of randomness. What can I do with that ridiculous magic? Am I going to suddenly create a piece of music like John Cage? Would I be able to predict tomorrow’s weather? Oh, then why don’t you sell this to the weather services?”
The doctor smiled as if she expected her response.
“If you think the prediction of tomorrow’s weather is the real cause of your pain, then you can use it to predict the weather,” the doctor continued.
“As long as we insist on our common sense on uncertainty, you are right. But think about some moments when you have really craved having for the most ultimate level of certainty and what you have tried in order to obtain it.”

There was a brief pause in the conversation. The doctor’s words invoked a few memories from her recent days. One of the things she remembered was her presentation at her workplace last week. It was part of the first annual general meeting in which all board members and stakeholders of her company participated. Not only her performance on the presentation but also the accuracy of her predictions for the next quarter were essential criteria of her evaluation for next promotion. To increase the accuracy of any prediction models, one needs a large number of data points, and the points have to be as randomly collected as possible. But current technologies devised to sample a set of data are not perfectly random and always suffer from systematic bias in any simulations. She flashed back to the moment when she had to examine every single piece of data to make sure her set of data points were distributed fairly enough to explain the statistical significance of her calculation. If she could maneuver the constituents of her data set to look more arbitrary than they were, she would have done that.

Her thoughts then flew to another moment when she had gotten in trouble due to a lack of randomness. For example, her stock exchange had warned her that her one-time password generator failed to create a different set of random numbers every second. So, she wasn’t able to do anything but waiting for the reissue of a more reliable generator while her stocks plummeted to the bottom. Secondly, her request to the transaction of one of her cryptocurrencies had halted because its Verified Random Function (VRF) [3] had a loophole that made it vulnerable to hackers. The VRF turned out to be dependent on pseudo-randomness that looked random but actually was not, which was an essential challenge for the next step of block-chain technology.

Entropy didn’t happen by accident. Probability that had been her tenet became what, in fact, exhausted her mental health. Maybe the real problem was neither probability nor uncertainty. It was in acknowledging her limited control over her security. She couldn’t get over many ways that predictability made her outraged at times and brought her so many sleepless nights. Having said that, all the cases she recalled might not be serious enough to permit her body to the mysterious clinical experimentation.

“Keep in mind that this is neither a superpower nor magic. And the level of the perfection of the randomness depends on individuals. But we are expecting that the irregularity of your mind will be able to create the perfect level of randomness,” the doctor said.
But she had already decided to leave the office and sprang out of her chair.

“I bet you won’t dismiss the power of randomness in every calculation in your life. Whenever you change your mind, don’t hesitate to call me back.”
The doctor’s voice was echoing off her back.


IV.

“I’ve observed the pattern of her mind for almost 3 years. It dawned on me that she would be a perfect model for your request.” Dr. Jermaine, her psychiatrist, said. He was sitting in a lounge chair in Roberta Brown’s office. It was around 11 pm and guests were not allowed to enter the building after that time.

“Stop saying it over and over again. I won’t forget to put your name in the acknowledgments when I publish,” Dr. Brown said, laughing.
“But honestly, I still have some reservations though. Was it really necessary to deploy human minds for your research? She was my patient and I handed her over to you. I feel like I have a right to know about it.”
“Here’s the thing, J. It never occurred to all of us that computers don’t have the ability to play dice with the universe,” said Dr. Brown. She sipped on her non-alcoholic drink and continued to talk.

“You may know that we have made a great amount of effort to obtain the perfect randomness of data solely through computer processing. Here’s the basic principle. To create a set of random numbers, we need a pool of resources, the so-called seeds. Each time computers are requested to create random numbers, they create a different combination of seeds. So, the unpredictability of a result is the consequence of how randomly the seeds can be arrayed. Here, the problem occurs; no matter how complicated the combinations of seeds are, a pool of seeds inevitably runs dry. We call this ‘Dry Pools,’ and it is a critical shortcoming for data security. This is because computers are, needless to say, deterministic so that they only process given inputs. They are not good at flipping a coin, let alone generating raw data. Even though the number of combinations of seeds seems infinite, computers begin to loop a pattern at a certain point when a pool of seeds runs dry regardless of the complexity of calculations. This means generating a random set of data requires also generating a random set of seeds. But despite the effort to make computers more autonomous, these idiot Deterministic Finite Automata are not likely to be self-determining individuals. Since a set of nearly random numbers produced solely through computer processing ends up being vulnerable to any type of hacking techniques, we’ve had to look for solutions outside of computation. The most common way was, as you might know, to use attributes of the physical world, such as the temperature of rooms, the liquidity of lava lamps, and the movement of flies. I am not a techno-libertarian like John Perry Barlow but depending on the physical world, even only partly, was a bit embarrassing for me. During my research, it struck me that the transmission of electrical signals in human brains is based on the principles of physics. The idea led me to try to comprehend how human minds work and to find a way to utilize the whimsy of the human minds as meta-data to feed computers perfectly unpredictable seeds!”

“What would you offer a patient for this exchange?” Dr. Jermaine asked.
“We should never dismiss our duty as a doctor, right?” Dr. Brown continued to talk.
“First of all, it would help them overcome their anxiety disorder, which is the priority both for our patients and us. What controls one’s anxiety is the amygdala in the brain, that mediates the feeling of fear, anxiety and their cognitive effects. It is likely to be more agitated especially when one has to make difficult decisions. The uncertainty of decisions makes one’s brain sensitively react to threat-related information, which prevents one from making rational decisions. Then, he or she is eventually caught in a vicious circle. Interestingly, the electric stimulus that we transmit to read the patterns of human minds turned out to also soothe the negative activity of the amygdala. With each conduct of the experimentation, we found it mitigated the level of anxiety more efficiently than any other current treatments do. Of course, the duration of the effect varied from patient to patient. However, we also found that though their level of anxiety decreased after treatment, they would invariably rise again after a certain amount of time. The reason for this is still unknown but I assumed human minds themselves turned out to be infinite generators that produce raw seeds which we call now…disorder.”

“But what you promised her sounded a bit different, wasn’t it?” Dr. Jermaine asked.

“Yes. After the treatment a few of the blessed… Well, it is too early to say if they are the blessed or the damned. Anyway, as I suggested to her, they will be given a set of random data generated by ‘their minds.’ It might not be necessarily useful for someone as there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch for everyone[4]. This is why we consider her a good seed, given the state of her mind, and the situations in which she finds herself.”
“Do you think she will consider your proposal?” Dr. Jermaine asked again.
“Well, what came up in her mind today might have been just a few memories that troubled her. They didn’t seem tricky enough to make her look kindly on my proposition. Her mind obsesses over every possibility, so I believe this will lead her to calculate the infinite scenarios in which she could make use of the power of randomness. Then it’ll be harder for her to resist all those intriguing possibilities.”

“But the nature of your work casts strong suspicion on us, even though you’re known for your transparency. As always, you won’t reveal what it’s all for, will you?”
She smiled but didn’t respond to his question.

It was the middle of the night and they savored the silence that lingered after their conversation.
Her phone began to ring, and by the look on her face, it seemed she know who it was.


V.

“A set of data is arriving!”

The soldier shouted in a small and dark room in the laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. No one outside of the building knew what was going on. Rumor had it that a group of scientists had been called upon to gather and initiate some cryptic project to terminate the on-going wars[5].

Surprised by his shouting, the researchers in the room approached the body of ENIAC that was printing a set of binary codes.
“The signal is even stronger than the last one. Did you see where and when those are coming from? Are they traveling from the same place and time as the previous one?” said Nicholas Metropolis. The Greek-American physicist couldn’t take his eyes off the needle of the frequency gauge.
“The signal is from the East Coast of the States… seems like New York state, but time is… not identified yet, sir.”
As soon as the soldier answered, he rushed towards the soldier’s seat and asked with excitement:
“Did you say New York?”
A thrill ran through him at the possibility of such a coincidence. He could see the headlines of the project now; The Manhattan Project [6] found success in its home city!
“Alright. Could you transport the data into the core part of the collision simulation?”

At the moment, another scientist, Stanislaw Ulam, barged into the conversation. This Polish-American scientist took a look at the samples and said to Metropolis,
“By the way, who on earth keeps sending them? At first, I was suspicious that these sets of data were being sent by them in order to disturb communication between the Allies. But through some examinations, I concluded that these were not coded by the Enigma machines. This is a set of data that is almost close to the state of nature, which means its level of randomness is perfect. So, we can reasonably expect them to replace the obsolete pseudo-random numbers, with the hope that they could be the key for solving the Many-body problem[7]. We will need a completely new simulation for it, right?”
“Absolutely. And this ENIAC could perform it. Who was a Hungarian genius that invented this monster?” Metropolis exclaimed.
“His name is von Neumann, sir. He is in fact working in the laboratory next to yours,” the soldier tipped him off.
“Did you really think I didn’t know? Have a look at it. This seems to be optimized for our new data as if he had known that it would come to us. I don’t dare to think I will be able to design something that outperforms it. With the mysterious data, with the intricate calculator, we put ourselves one step closer to our goal!” Metropolis shouted with excitement.

“So, will this group of data become seeds for the hydrodynamical calculations for our collision model?” Ulam asked.

“We still have several steps to reach that stage because our current model is still incapable of offering an optimal solution to the new data. Thus, our goal is to calibrate a new model that facilitate the randomness of seeds to create high level of entropy. It will maximize the travel distance of a neutron. Then, when it collides with any atomic nucleus by creating energy it will lead to an incalculably huge explosion as atomic bombs. This is key for our great cause forhumanity, which is the end of the war.”

“By the way, do you have a codename in your mind for our new model?” Metropolis asked.
“Well, I’m still looking for a word that sounds arbitrary to adversaries but intuitive for us,” Ulam replied.
“What was the name of the casino again?”
“What a random question! What do you mean by that? Are you planning on trying your luck at a casino?” Ulam asked dubiously. He didn’t know where this question was coming from.
“No. You said there’s a casino in Monaco your uncle often visits to gamble. Does he still go there every week? What was the name again?”
“Oh, the Monte Carlo Casino. Do you happen to want…”
Metropolis interrupted Ulam’s mid-sentence,
“Yes. That was it. Let’s name the new model ‘the Monte Carlo method[8]’ because casinos are places where the random numbers are most needed, aren’t they?”

“Fair point, my friend.”

The darkness was falling on another night in the year 1946.

[1] Pascal’s triangle is a triangular array of numbers in which those at the ends of the rows are 1 and each of the others is the sum of the nearest two numbers in the row above. Its applications function in diverse fields such as algebra, combinatorics, and probability theory. It is named after the French mathematician Blaise Pascal in the 17th century although this formula had already been studied by other mathematicians over the world centuries before Pascal’s time.

[2] The Reddit group r/wallstreetbets (https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/) is a subreddit in which participants discuss stock and option trading. This became well-known for its aggressive trading strategies, highly speculative leveraged option trading mostly ignoring fundamental investment practices and risk management techniques. Their trading is often considered gambling rather than investment.

[3]  Verified Random Function is a pseudo-random function that provides publicly verifiable proof of its outputs’ correctness. It is widely used in various areas of cryptography: for generating keys from a secret value, in the mechanisms of digital signatures, micropayment.

[4] “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” is a famous adage introduced by Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It is often used to describe opportunity cost in economics. Her intention of mentioning ‘free lunch’ implies an ambiguous connotation from the theory ‘No Free Lunch Theorem. It describes an algorithm that is optimized for a specific problem and cannot be generalized to efficiently function for other problems.

[5] The Laboratory refers to LANL, Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is now well-known as a United States Department of Energy national laboratory. This was initially organized in 1942 by a team of scientists, engineers, and technicians led by UC Berkeley physics professor J. Robert Oppenheimer with the purpose of beginning the secret mission to help end World War II.

[6] Manhattan Project was the codename for research and development during World War II, mainly led by the U.S. with the support of the U.K. and Canada. For the project, a group of the preeminent physicists, scientists, and mathematicians were invited to develop a functional weapon – atomic bombs.

[7] The Many-body problem refers to a wide arrange of physical problems regarding the properties of quantum mechanics consisting of numerous interacting particles.

[8] The Monte Carlo Method, also known as Monte Carlo Simulation, is a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. It was devised during the Manhattan Project and became a major contribution to the success of the atomic bombs. The method is broadly applied to diverse fields, such as Applied Statistics, Finance Business, and Artificial Intelligence.