A device for randomness
From kleroterion and randomness to emergence and emergence theory, and the origin of life
Kleroterion
The kleroterion was a randomisation device (a lottery system) used by the ancient Athenians during the period of democracy to select citizens to the city council, to most state offices and to court juries.
Athenians were aware of the risks of corruption; they knew that a judge could be bribed but not a crowd, so they used to form big juries (500 people) that were randomly selected shortly before the trial. For that reason each citizen brought his personal ID (a piece of wood or bronze called pinakion), that a justice officer slotted into a kleroterion, a machine generating randomness.
The kleroterion was simple to operate. Holes in the stone (slots), cut in several vertical lines, held the ‘tokens’ (pinakia) of each potential judge. A wooden tube was held in place next to the lines of tokens. A series of white and black balls were put into a funnel at the top of the wooden tube and allowed to percolate down its length. At the bottom, they were stopped by a crank- driven device. The crank was turned, and one ball dropped out. If the ball was black, the first row of pinakia was removed, and their owners were dismissed. If the ball was white, the first row of tickets remained in place, and their owners were judges for the day. Another ball was released, another row of candidates dismissed or accepted, and so on. At last the final ball was dropped and the trial began.
That was the first application of randomness in politics. Athenian democracy was based on the concept of isonomia (equality of political rights) and this complex allotment machine was their way to ensure that the positions on the ruling committees that ran Athens were fairly allocated.
But what is randomness?
Randomness
In ancient history, the concepts of randomness and chance were intertwined with that of fate.
Pre-Christian people along the Mediterranean threw dice to determine fate, and this later evolved into games of chance. There is also evidence of games of chance played by ancient Egyptians, Hindus and Chinese, dating back to 2100 BC. The Chinese of 3000 years ago were perhaps the earliest people to formalize odds and chance.
According to Wikipedia, randomness is the lack of pattern or predictability in events.
A random sequence of events, symbols or steps has no order and does not follow an intelligible pattern or combination.
In fact, randomness is the quality of having no apparent order. Individual random events are by definition unpredictable, but in many cases the frequency of different outcomes over a large number of events (or “trials”) is predictable. In this view, randomness is a measure of uncertainty of an outcome.
But does randomness really exist in our world?
According to the textbooks of biology, large molecules (for example proteins) were initially formed on the primordial earth randomly; a theory that nowadays has its limitations.