For years I’ve been settling down in diners and asking the waitress to tell me the soup du jour.  By the way, du jour is French for of the day, so it’s redundant to the point of gauche to ask about the soup du jour of the day.  Probably, though, none of you have ever done that, or if you did you were tripping over your words at the time, you know, your tongue got in the way of your eye teeth so you couldn’t see what you were saying.  Forget all that; that’s not today’s topic.

  Back on point, I would ask what soups were being served, and I would be told.  Only quite recently did I realize that most diners try to serve the same soups on the same days of the week.

  I realized this, ultimately, because we asked.  The local diner has a cream of crab soup that my wife loves, and a lobster bisque that she also enjoys, and we asked our favorite waitress whether there was method to the madness so that we could try to come when they had the right soups.  Indeed, the one is served on Fridays and the other on Sundays.  I should have realized that diners did this long before.  Every month we have a Sunday afternoon business meeting at a diner (a different diner in a town conveniently located midway between the participants) and I am always being told that they are serving Manhattan clam chowder.  Personally, I think that it should be illegal to call something chowder that contains tomatoes; I understand that in Boston it is illegal to do that (although there are such ample reasons not to live in Boston that this one bright spot is not sufficient to overcome them).  However, New Jersey is not so enlightened in that area, so every month I decline the soup and look for something edible on the menu.  It took me a long time to realize that they always had that same soup on Sunday.

  I considered this, and thought there was something here for this column.  I turned over in my mind the way this impacted my impressions of the two diners.  On the one hand, we do make special trips to the diner that serves my wife’s preferred soups on the days that they are offered, so the consistency of the schedule brings them our business on days when we have no other reason to be there.  On the other hand, I never buy soup at our meetings, and have a less favorable opinion of the diner because they never have any soup I like when I’m there.

  It’s not the diner’s fault, though, that I’m only there on Sundays; they may well serve excellent soups on other days of the week.  My sampling of their menu may seem random to me, but it’s not really random at all–it follows a clear pattern which happens to mesh in a specific fashion with the clear pattern followed by the diner.

  That is, some things appear random, but are not, and other things which do not appear random might be.

  When my mother strips the beds and washes the sheets, she sends my father to flip the mattresses (or at least, they did that for all the years that I was growing up).  Flipping a mattress is supposed to extend its life; my wife and I once owned a mattress that had flipping instructions printed on the corners, in essence telling you which direction to flip it for even wearing.  We never could follow the directions, as we exhibit none of the organizational skills my mother, once a General Motors efficiency expert and later a math teacher, displays.  However, my father had a very simple system for deciding how to flip the mattress.  The essential principle is that it must be flipped sometimes end to end and sometimes side to side, so that it will wear as evenly as possible under the stress of people sleeping on it.  The instructions on the mattress had all the qualities of tire rotation, telling you which corner had to go where when.  My father’s solution was simpler.  If my mother sent him to flip the mattress on an odd-numbered day, he flipped it end to end; if it was an even-numbered day, he flipped it side to side.  This, he maintained, would cause the mattress randomly to land in each of the four possible orientations with equal probability and therefore equal outcomes over time.

  I agreed, but observed immediately that this was only true if Mom was not also influenced by the calendar date in deciding when to strip the beds.  That is, if she always stripped the beds on the fifteenth of the month, it would always be an odd day on which he flipped the mattresses, and they would never be flipped side to side.  In this case, she was more influenced by the day of the week, and therefore the system worked.

  It puts me on notice, however, that sometimes what we think are random results are not only not random, but not distributed as random results would be.  Those of you who write programs are probably aware that if you use seed-based random numbers and enter the same seed number into the program, you’ll get the same “random” numbers every time–that is, you don’t get random numbers from a random number generator, just unpredictable ones, and they become predictable if you fail to vary the input.

  It may seem that this is far from anything relevant to most of our games.  Few of us use random number generators in play.  However, we often do make decisions in response to things we mistakenly believe are random.  Pick a letter by opening a book at random to see what the first letter is on the page–but there is a known sequence of letters most likely to start a word which is different from the known sequence of most commonly used letters, different again if you account for distribution of words commonly used, and yet again for words likely to begin a sentence (which thus would be more likely to be the first word on a page in many books), and again for books which use foreign words and phrases extensively, or which are in another language.  Children play a game with apples, twisting the stem once for each letter of the alphabet in search of the first letter of the name of the person they will marry; but this is skewed toward the center of the alphabet, because precious few will break on the first twist and far fewer will reach the end of the alphabet.  If you decide something based on the date of the game, or the time of night, be certain that there is nothing about your play schedule that will skew the date or time to a particular imbalance.

  Rochambo, better known as rock paper scissors, is an interesting example of a randomizer used in play that is not always random.  A lot of live action role play uses this method to resolve conflicts.  A fair number of players successfully skew the odds by studying the play patterns of the other players, identifying people who always start with rock, or who after a tie always change to the one that would have beaten that, or would have lost to it, or the ones who will repeat the same entry after a tie.  In essence, these players turn rochambo into a test of skill, not a randomizer but an opportunity to outplay an opponent to gain an advantage.

  Yet the reverse is also true.  There may be things that are not at all random in the world in which you are playing, but which are most easily represented by randomizers.  We discussed Weather only two weeks ago, where it was suggested that a single roll can determine whether the weather is favorable or not, but even the more complicated approaches ultimately are randomized.  Real weather is not random; it just seems so to those of us who don’t know the patterns.  So, too, it may well be that the giant takes a walk down to the lake to fetch water every day at this time, but since we’ve never been here before we couldn’t possibly know that.  The roll of a random encounter, so annoying as a concept to so many gamers, in this case represents not the random presence of the giant, but the fact that we (including the referee) were unaware that he would be fetching water at this time.  A rockslide or landslide or snowslide is not a random event; nor are earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, tidal waves and tornadoes.  They are caused events, part of a causal chain that culminated at this moment in a disruption.  They are easier to bring into play as random events, because tracking the details of the world sufficiently to know these things is more than we can do.

  You could make your decision based on the smile on my face or the color of my shirt, but unless you know what my smile means or whether there’s method to my shirt selection you’re on very shaky ground–the one is likely to mean something you didn’t guess, and the other to mean nothing at all.  But it might be the other way around.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.