The Dark Balloon

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Dial J. for homework help, part 2 of a 10-part series.

Because God gave us this biological Turing machine of a body, we can run all of the algorithms our primordial field of computer science has discovered. This is to say, not many: Quicksort, but that’s O(n log n), which is terribly inefficient; A*, which the brain used for neural pathways until the version 59.32 in the 14th century that prompted the Southern Renaissance; and—most importantly—the Mersenne Twister, a psuedorandom number generator.

Why a PRNG and not skip right to RNG? Stochastic brains were tried in 59.34 but the resulting administrative messes in Heaven led to a series of organizational disasters. These culminated in the Cold War. Imagine it from God’s perspective: Decades of completely irrational behavior that you can’t “divinely tamper.” It was with great angelic relief when humans became deterministic again. Sure the output of PRNGs are notoriously difficult for humans to calculate, but it’s a walk in the park for God because God also invented parks and walking. In the end, it was the illusion that mattered.

Wikipedia, the largest sentient being we know, has this to say about the Mersenne Twister: Matsumoto and Nishimura developed it in 1997 with Monte Carlo simulations in mind. Of course, you can’t summarize years of research in one sentence any more than you can say World War II happened because of three rabbits and a bonfire—even if it is true—because while you’ve addressed the primary cause, you’ve eviscerated the story of all its supporting cast. Matsumoto met Nishimura on a bicycling expedition down the Japura River in the Amazon. Nishimura was drowning in the heady vapors of the Amazon, which would settle on and bite your hand like ferociously emotional mosquitoes. Like you and me, they developed a friendship on the banks of a majestic river yards away from horny alligators. They were never supposed to have met, but that’s what happens when you let loose stochastic humans and the butterfly effect in the same universe. Their two brains, two halves of a quine, colluded to reveal a commented-out Mersenne Twister in a pure and beautiful language no man has ever understood before or after that divine revelation. That language was Haskell, and their algorithm did indeed influence the tiny field of Monte Carlo simulations, but isn’t this story much nicer?

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Dial J. for homework help, part 1 of a 10-part series

J. stood outside his room, staring at the faux oak paneling. He nestled his toes in the brittle gray carpet, which was last cleaned—by accident—back when the only hole the Antarctic had was The Sinkhole. The Sinkhole was and perhaps is still a grungy bar where rugged marine biologists, made cynics by the twin demons of academia and government, chugged down a few beers in between tackling polar bears and ice demons, both external and internal. J. knew none of this. If he had, his thoughts would’ve been quickly drowned out by the thumping bass music playing in the room across the hallway from the time J. tried to fall asleep to the time J. tried to fall awake. To understand J., we must first understand the brain.

The brain is a large biological machine run by God’s chemicals, things with a bunch of carbon in them usually. God likes carbon because he likes the number 12. Jesus once petitioned the people of Aramaia to convert to base 12 with no luck. The mathematic world, faced with this vacuum, chose base 10. By sheer coincidence, base 10 is Satan’s favorite number. Base 10 is Satan’s greatest achievement.