by Yohan J. John
“Mine is a dizzying country in which the Lottery is a major element of reality; until this day, I have thought as little about it as about the conduct of the indecipherable gods or of my heart.”
–The Lottery in Babylon by Jorge Luis Borges
In his classic short story The Lottery in Babylon, Borges invites us to imagine a culture that valorizes randomness, institutionalizing it in an official lottery that entangles itself with every aspect of life, and even non-life. By situating this culture in Babylon, Borges frees himself to conjure up an alien way of life. And yet, as with all great speculative fiction, Borges also seems to be holding a mirror up to nature — a funhouse mirror that warps and amplifies features that we can discern even in our own culture. In his evocative and succinct way, Borges is perhaps hinting that we continue to live in that dizzying country in which randomness is a major component of reality.
The Indecipherable Gods
How long has randomness been an element in the periodic table of ideas? For ancient people, chance was wrapped up with the concepts of fate and divine will. “Divination” comes from the Latin for “to be inspired by a god”. For the Romans, chance or luck was personified by the goddess Fortuna. To tell a person's fortune was to determine the hidden intentions of Lady Luck. The ancient Chinese used yarrow stalks, coins, and dice when consulting the 4000-year-old I Ching, or Book of Changes. Divination either led to, or co-evolved with, games of chance. The earliest known board game is Senet, which was played by ancient Egyptians as early in the 30th century BCE. The game seems to have involved casting two-sided tokens. A 5000 year old backgammon set,complete with dice, was excavated at a site in Iran. Dice from 2000 BCE have also been found at sites that were part of the Indus Valley civilization [1].
Ancient peoples seem to have attached great meaning to chance events — even in the context of games. Confronted with the sheer unpredictability of nature, ancient people populated their pantheons with gods and demons who were capricious in the extreme. They seem to have believed that participating in chance events of their own invention could give them a glimpse into the otherwise inscrutable ways of divine beings [1]. Or perhaps they reasoned that they could become like gods through imitation of their ludicrous whims. The word “ludicrous”, incidentally, derives from the Latin root ludus,which means “game” or “play”. At some point in the past few hundred years,the word came to mean “ridiculous” — perhaps the Enlightenment made Europeans look unfavorably upon frivolity and play. There are streams within Hinduism, however, that preserve an echo of the ancient worldview — in some scriptures the universe is described as as lila, or divine play. The gods, according to this view, engage in creation and destruction for fun or sport. In India the term lila did not pick up any connotations of ridiculousness: it is a well-known theological concept, as well as a popular name given to girls.
In the modern world randomness typically connotes the very opposite of divine will — outside the world of gambling and gaming, a random event is often described as meaningless, and therefore only a source of inconvenience or tragedy. The ancients may have confronted chance with a more cheery attitude than is common today, but there is no suggestion that they were able to translate any intuitions derived from gambling (or fortune-telling) into a mathematical theory of chance. This hole in ancient knowledge is striking, because much of the mathematics required to begin the study randomness — simple arithmetic — was known to ancient cultures all over the world [2].
Order out of Chaos
The seeds of a mathematical approach to randomness were planted in the 16th century, when Europeans thinkers realized that chance events and processes were not completely devoid of order. This realization contributed to the emergence of two related but complementary mathematical approaches: probability and statistics. The theory of probability allowed people to uncover patterns in controlled settings, such as games of chance. Statistics allowed people to uncover patterns in more natural, uncontrolled settings, such as mortality tables compiled for insurance purposes.
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