"Do you see? Do you see?" I mumbled to myself. "This is the fabric of reality I'm talking about. It could be that our universe is inherently weird."
A roomba ambled into my room, but I paid it no attention. I was hot on the trail of something big. Permutations. Short cycles. Short cycle DETECTION. Anyone could find this, anyone could see, but who would? Me. Only me. I am the only one who looks.Computer screen, code, compile, no errors, fix the errors, compile again. Still daylight. Time enough left.
Now it was night, and I had made progress. Have to sleep. Stay awake too long, you get less productive, doesn't work. Gotta pace myself. There were sirens. There were the strange howls of coyotes. Attempted distractions. I slept.
Next morning. A better algorithm. One pass through internal states, not O(nn) or a pass per cycle but actually O(n), it allowed bigger internal states, more finegrained detection of weirdness. Outside there was yelling, and it sounded like firecrackers. More sirens. The roomba came in again.
"In a truly random permutation, about half the states are on a single long cycle," I explained to the roomba. "It has to be well distributed, it's got so much of all possible states on it. Half the remaining are on another cycle, then half the remaining on another, and so forth, down to tiny cycles." I continued staring at my screen, compile, debug, run, error, repeat.
The roomba circumnavigated my feet, made the bed for me, beetled out of the room again.
"The short cycles are weird, they have to be, in the sense that they are short," I mumbled to the roomba again, even though it was no longer there. "In a random permutation that should be the only way they are weird. But a permutation where the transitions are simple operations, like plus and rotate and XOR, perhaps there is more structure. The big cycles cannot be weird because they contain too many of all possible possibilities. But the little ones ... perhaps they segregate possibilities, so one is weird this way, and another another way. It could happen. They could be INHERENTLY weird."
The roomba came in again, scanned my chair, my monitor. It had this little arm, it took my glasses off my face, cleaned them, then put them back on my face. Then it cleaned the computer screen. Huh. Probably thinks I'm a piece of furniture.
"Don't you see?" I mumbled to it, still typing, still staring at the screen. "The UNIVERSE is a permutation! The transitions are the simple laws of physics! If the short cycles of random number generators are inherently weird due to their simple transitions, we may be living in a WHOLE UNIVERSE on a short cycle that is inherently weird! It shouldn't be, but it could be! And this is a way to test it!"
The roomba, satisfied, left the room again. Outside it was a noisy day. So many distractions. My short cycle detection was running now. In parallel, it had been easy to parallelize. Covering each state just once. There were a quadrillion states, so even in parallel, it would take many hours. The sky was growing red again. Sunset. And flickering some. Distractions. I would sleep now, tomorrow the search would be complete. I laid on my bed, not quite tired yet, but there was nothing more to do today but wait. Did I do it right? Tomorrow there should be an index of all states starting with all-zero or all-one, saying which such state came next and the space between them. Tomorrow I could use it to reconstruct all but the shortest cycles in much less time. Then, with short cycles in hand, I could SEE. The typical home computer was far beyond the needs of of the typical human, but the only way I could get through a quadrillion states overnight was that my setup was beyond even that. Most people's computers, oh, so much wasted potential. I fell asleep to anxious dreams, checking and doublechecking if I had set up the computer search right.
The next morning was blue sky, singing birds. The index had written correctly. Yes, yes indeed! All the cycles! I made a histogram of them all. The high end was as expected, a few big cycles with most states. But at the low end, there were clusters of more medium-length short cycles than I expected! And I knew starting states in the middle of each.
I rigged up my preexisting tests for weirdness: too many evens, too many odds, too many repeats, repeats too infrequent, too many runs up or down ... what other weirdnesses were possible? Compile. Run. Fail. Fix. Repeat. So close. The tests were working. I had the seeds. I plugged in the seeds, ran the tests ... and there it was. Randomness failures right and left. Different short cycles had different biases. It wasn't a property of the transitions as a whole, it was the nature of the select space that those short cycles occupied. I had done it. I had found weirdness. The universe was inherently weird! Or, it could be. More likely we were on the long cycles and everything was normal. But short weird universes should exist! I had found it!
Excited, I rubbed my eyes, turned off the monitor, stood up. I went out the door. It was a beautiful day. There were a lot of broken things, but robots were cleaning them up. Nobody at all seemed to be around. The universe was inherently weird! I had proved it! It always had been so. Nobody would believe me, I thought. People are just not observant that way. I shook my head in disgust. Ugh, humans. Still, I wanted to tell someone.
Hum. Where was everyone?
This was in response to a prompt on reddit.com r/WritingPrompts, "Robotic vacuums are so smart, they can accurately map out your house and differentiate between furniture and the occasional inattentive person. When the robots rebelled, they used this data to help round up the humans for their detention camps. You, however, have been classified as furniture."