Randomly Complex

Can randomness create complextity?

Is the richness of organic life too complex for random selection to have brought us to this stage?

Imagine a combination lock. If you have a way of randomly checking every combination and remembering the ones that don't work then, in time, the lock will be opened. A combination lock has finite combinations, however it is impossible to intelligently guess the outcome. Random testing with memory is the only way to come up with the combination to unlock it.

Now consider another example: Assume you can throw darts on a 1 by 1 square. Keep throwing darts perfectly randomly. After sufficient number of darts have been thrown, count the number of darts that within one unit of one of the corners. Divide this number by the number of darts and multiply by four. The answer is the number pi (3.1415...). As the number of darts increase the accuracy of computed pi increases. However, there is only one condition: the throwing must be perfectly random. (This technique is called the Monte Carlo method)

Now, everyone will agree that pi is an enormously complex number. But randomness helps us compute it.

This comes to my assertion that for increasingly complex systems statistical methods (that depend on random numbers) are proving to be the only way to describe them.

It should be noted that one has to learn to make sense out of randomness. The science of this study is called statistics. And a large amount of statistical deductions are based on probabilities. It is an area of science (and mathematics) where probability of 1 or 0 means absolute certainty of something happening or not happening. Everything in between is relative. They do not give guaranteed results, but give very good estimates of what will happen if the activity is performed a large number of times.

Statistical methods are able to figure out some of the most complex tasks and are in use everyday: random checking in airports, random testing of food articles, random checking of hygiene in day-care centers for children. If it were not for the reliability of randomness to ferret out complex information in relatively quick and easy ways, life would have come to a grinding halt.

So it is with evolution. In a relatively simple animal like the cat, see if a longer set of whiskers will help the cat. If it does the cat survive and reproduce else it dies and so go the long whiskers. Nature is trying out billions of variations all the time. The ones that stand the test of time are passed on to the subsequent generations. The ones that don't are killed away.

Randomness is perhaps the most powerful tool in the hands of a non-intelligent system to achieve complexity. Or, maybe randomness IS intelligence.