I’ve been wrestling with a peculiar thought experiment for a couple of years now, one that keeps surfacing in my mind like a persistent itch. It starts with a scenario that’s deliberately stark: imagine you’re alone in a prison cell with absolutely no variation in your environment. The lights never shut off, there’s no way to tell time, and you can’t see anything through the window except an identical empty cell across the way. You have a concrete slab for a bed, basic plumbing that can’t be manipulated for entertainment, and clothing that’s been thoroughly searched. The key constraint here is that there’s truly nothing variable about your situation—no loose buttons to throw, no interesting floor tiles to count, no external inputs whatsoever.
In this environment, how do you generate a random number? It’s a question that sounds academic until you consider its implications. Sure, you could think of a word and count its letters, or try to come up with numbers “randomly” in your head, but these approaches introduce significant bias. Your brain has patterns, preferences, tendencies that make true randomness nearly impossible. If you’re stuck in that cell for months or years, rolling virtual sixes over and over again because of cognitive bias could seriously impact whatever mental game you’re trying to play.