11 posts
From city names to military strategy, some of history's most consequential moments came down to a coin toss, a card draw, or blind luck. Here are a few worth knowing.
Random jury selection is one of the oldest applications of randomization in civic life. The principle behind it shaped democratic theory — and it's under more pressure now than ever.
The Magic 8-Ball has been dispensing vague wisdom since 1946. Its origin story involves a clairvoyant mother, a Cincinnati toymaker, and a billiard ball full of blue dye.
Dice have been used for randomization for over five thousand years. But not all dice are created equal — and the physics of a fair roll are more interesting than you'd expect.
Randomized experiments are the backbone of modern medicine, tech, and social science. Here's the surprisingly recent history of how we learned to trust random assignment over expert judgment.
Casino games are random on every individual spin, roll, or hand. But over thousands of plays, the math guarantees the house comes out ahead. Here's how that works.
Professional sports use weighted lotteries to distribute top draft picks. The system is an elegant but imperfect solution to one of the strangest incentive problems in competition.
Every major sport uses a coin toss to settle something before the game begins. It seems trivial — but the strategy, psychology, and controversy around it are anything but.
Seven shows up everywhere — slot machines, dice, religion, psychology experiments. The reasons have less to do with math and more to do with how our brains process the world.
Playing cards have traveled from Tang Dynasty China to European courts to your phone screen. Their design has changed remarkably little — and the reasons why tell us something about how good design endures.
From Dadaist poets cutting up newspapers to Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, randomness has been a deliberate creative method for longer than most people realize.