For my day job, I recently wrote an article on the use of artificial intelligence within a certain specialized field of investing. I won't tell you what the investments in question were. Rather, I'd like to make a point about AI that I learned, or at least came to appreciate more fully, while working on this piece. One of my interviewees for the story told me this, “For many people, AI is still a black box. But the source of the innovation, and of the resulting errors, is in principle simple: a random number generator. This is attached to a machine-learning system that reins in that randomness according to a model of what is realistic and what is not.” So: randomness is critical to AI, just as it is critical to, say, biological evolution. Random variations give the process of natural selection some clay to shape. In the AI context, this notion of AI as a box containing a random number generator which has to be restrained reminds me of Goldilock's love of ...