Hi all, sorry for the late and inconsistent updates. It’s been a race-around week.

To ponder: randomness in a system is necessary for its survival. Take a trail of ants following each other to a food source. Though the trail is necessary and ensures the survival of the colony but keeping everyone together and ensuring their arrival at the food source and return trip to the colony, if you look closely at it, you’ll see about 3-5% of the ants are off the trail, randomly wondering this way and that way, seemingly off target, on their own. They’ll go off in their own direction, sometimes never finding food and dying. But they can’t help themselves. They’re the source of the randomness in the “system” of the colony that keeps it going, and they don’t really have a choice. In the event that the food source at the end of the trail turns out to be bad, or depleted, the whole colony is doomed unless able to quickly establish a link with a new sources. That new link is only possible to the extent that it has random members going off trail, doing their own thing. When they find food, they become the head of the new trail.

Randomness is a critical aspect of any complex system. From the quantum foam of particles popping in and out of existence at subatomic levels, to the creation of stem cells in the human liver, it’s the randomness that ensures survival. It’s how we’ve evolved as a species, and indeed how every form of life has ever evolved: survival of the random members, the different members, when the entire environment changes, or when the disease breaks out, or when the hive mind leads everyone to destruction, it’s the randomly different who survive, and whose reproduction leads to survival for the species.

Randomness in a complex system is everything. Otherwise, there’s no complexity. I see that now.