Are you making your own decisions and mainlining causality like a sucker? Why go through the agony, when you could hand over the railway switch of determinism to a machine that can decide things for you! Enter the DeDeterminator, a decision machine from [Oliver Child].
The idea is simple. At the press of a button, the DeDeterminator illuminates a bulb—indicating either yes or no. The decision for which bulb to illuminate is truly random, as it’s determined by the radioactive decay of a Americium-241 alpha particle source. A Geiger-Muller tube is used to detect alpha particles, with the timing between detections used to determine the yes-or-no output of the device.
It’s a neat concept, and it’s kind of fun knowing that your decision is both out of your hands and as random as it could possibly be. Would the universe guide you wrong? Who could possibly question the reasoning of the particles? The only rational move could be to comply with whatever directive the box hath given. Just don’t ask it to make any decisions with dangerous outcomes.
We’ve featured other projects using radioactive decay for random number generation before, though they weren’t quite as philosophically intriguing as the DeDeterminator. Mostly they’re just about cryptographic security and such, but some do deal with causality in imaginary spaces, which has its own magic about it.
Meanwhile, if you’ve untangled the quantum chains of cause and effect, or you’ve just found a way to break RSA encryption using a Pi Pico, do drop us a line, won’t you?
An overengineered D2 die (AKA a coin) (Yes he probably mentioned this himself) (No I didn’t watch)
Can we study ESP with it?
This is all very well, but does the box contain a cat???
Schrodinger says there might be a cat in the box but it might be alive or not.
**Pushes button on DeDeterminator**
“No, apparently.”
“…making your own decisions and mainlining causality like a sucker? Why go through the agony, when you could hand over the railway switch of determinism…”
Now that thar is funny!
Kudos to Lewin Day!
Add a chatGPT feature and it might actually be useful.
My recollection is that this idea did not work out to well for the main character (hero?) in ‘The Dice Man’ (Luke Rhinehart), firt published in 1971.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dice_Man
I was thinking that as I read the article but I also though “there’s no way I’ll remember what book that was, it was so long ago”. Then BOOM NoName steps in
this looks like the time machine from Napoleon Dynamite. Don’t forget the crystals!
Excellent. I love this sort of thing.
Bonus for me is that I have the exact same “project box”, in slightly better condition too :-)
I also have the same box. Keep it original cause they’re actually quite collectible.
If we look at where the world is going, this will be a weapon of mass destruction.
In the Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Physics, this would be one of the very few times where the you in one “World” would be doing something different from the you in the other “World”
Imagine being in the world where you get “yes” (or “no”) for one million times in a row: there must be one. Or, on second thought, infinite…
The universe could be superdeterministic, meaning that all particles of the universe are correlated since the beginning of time.
If so, the decisions the box makes could be deterministic as well.
How did they decide the right timing to get a fair output?
Flipping a coin is a great way to make decisions, because if you see the results and go “best of 3” then your true feelings have been revealed to you.
A quantum phenomenon is not the same as a non-deterministic or random one.
Or are some telling that quantum physics obeys not rules at all, and things like the sudden apparition of particle-antiparticle pairs from the vacuum, are actual “magic” and “tricks”? Another think is that WE are able to understand or recognize these rules or its manifestations.
The results the box shows, could be completely pre-written since the beginning of Time. as any other think in the universe.
Every US election booth should have one.
I mean it even uses Americium-241, Americum, enough said.