12 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.
When Apple first made shuffle truly random, users complained it wasn't random enough. The fix tells us something important about the gap between mathematical randomness and human perception.
Every great board game manages the tension between chance and control. Here's how designers use randomness to keep games fair, surprising, and fun for players of all levels.
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.
The classic method of folding slips of paper and pulling one from a hat feels random. The physics and psychology of it tell a different story.
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.
From seed dispersal to genetic mutation, randomness isn't a flaw in biological systems — it's a survival strategy. Here's how nature uses chance to stay resilient.
Blowing on dice, begging the wheel, cursing the coin — we treat random objects as if they have agency. The psychology behind it reveals something fundamental about how humans understand the world.
We think we understand randomness, but decades of research say otherwise. Here's why your brain can't help finding patterns in chaos — and why that matters.
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.