The Sovereignty of God over Randomness
I had a weird thought today. I was coding, as usual. Right now i have a bunch of software agents that play Prisoner's Dilemma and "learn" a best response strategy to what the opponent does. I don't really want to get in details. The only relevant thing to my story is that 10% of the time, agents explore, i.e. at a random moment in time (which is on average once every 10 steps) take a random action (the rest of the time, their action is determined by what they think is "best" for them).
So as i was commenting the code, i wrote something about the agent "choosing to cooperate". I stopped to think about the software agent's choice. Theoretically, i can't be sure about what the agent will do at a certain step, since there is a 10% chance that it will take a random action. I don't know when that's going to happen and i don't know what the action will be. Randomness is very useful, esp in what i'm working at right now, because it models the real world, where some events are random.
But, thinking about this, i realized that the random number generator that i use, is actually not completely random. It's a complicated mathematical function that can be used to generate a series of apparently random numbers. Since i'm using Java, i could probably find out what this function is, and know exactly when my agent will take a "random" action (i'll also know exactly what that "random" action will be) and be able to predict exactly what it will do.
This helps me think about the sovereignty of God and our choice. Lately, i've heard a lot about love as a choice and God's knowing and predestining things, about our "free will" and His sovereignty and have been praying that i'd get some understanding about it. I know that some things we can't know and understand completely. But some we can. And about some, we'll be curious our whole lives and never get them. But that can't keep us from asking questions and trying to figure out things.
So going back to my agents: it's true that they are just some peaces of software, following a pretty much deterministic algorithm. But using randomness, even if it's pseudo randomness, helps us model the world and a lot of times that works very well. And maybe, just as we are reflecting God and the whole world is under His sovereign control all the time, so our model reflects the real world, not at the same level of complexity, not having the same number of dimensions, but capturing a projection that can be grasped and modeled by us and our limited resources.
Currently listening: David Crowder Band - Everything Glorious
So as i was commenting the code, i wrote something about the agent "choosing to cooperate". I stopped to think about the software agent's choice. Theoretically, i can't be sure about what the agent will do at a certain step, since there is a 10% chance that it will take a random action. I don't know when that's going to happen and i don't know what the action will be. Randomness is very useful, esp in what i'm working at right now, because it models the real world, where some events are random.
But, thinking about this, i realized that the random number generator that i use, is actually not completely random. It's a complicated mathematical function that can be used to generate a series of apparently random numbers. Since i'm using Java, i could probably find out what this function is, and know exactly when my agent will take a "random" action (i'll also know exactly what that "random" action will be) and be able to predict exactly what it will do.
This helps me think about the sovereignty of God and our choice. Lately, i've heard a lot about love as a choice and God's knowing and predestining things, about our "free will" and His sovereignty and have been praying that i'd get some understanding about it. I know that some things we can't know and understand completely. But some we can. And about some, we'll be curious our whole lives and never get them. But that can't keep us from asking questions and trying to figure out things.
So going back to my agents: it's true that they are just some peaces of software, following a pretty much deterministic algorithm. But using randomness, even if it's pseudo randomness, helps us model the world and a lot of times that works very well. And maybe, just as we are reflecting God and the whole world is under His sovereign control all the time, so our model reflects the real world, not at the same level of complexity, not having the same number of dimensions, but capturing a projection that can be grasped and modeled by us and our limited resources.
Currently listening: David Crowder Band - Everything Glorious
posted by Monica | 7:08 PM
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