I was tagged in a note on facebook, titled ‘25 random facts about myself’. You’re supposed to write “25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you”, and tag 25 people, as well as the author of the note. What does it mean to write a random fact about yourself?
Let’s figure out how many facts I could choose from. To simplify things, let’s suppose my life occurs in one-second ‘frames’, and that my life is constant for the duration of that frame. In other words, lets assume time is divided into fixed-length quanta. As of the time of this posting, I am a little over 23.5 years old. That’s approximately 700 million seconds. If a ’story’ about myself is a sequence of quanta, there are 2700 = 5.3 x 10210 possible stories about myself I could tell. For comparison, there are about calculated to be 1080 atoms in the universe. Even if I increase the size of the quantum to an hour, and limit stories to be descriptions of no more than 20 quanta, we have 7x1078 possible stories. That’s still a lot of stories.
Interestingly enough, if I used python’s random number generator, the Mersenne Twister algorithm, I could actually implement a program to randomly select one of those stories, because it has a period of 219937-1. I thought about generating a truly random story, using a sweet bit of python code, but it probably wouldn’t be too interesting. It’d be really difficult to write anything about what I was doing at 4:00 on March 3, 1994, other than ‘I was 8 years old.’