I just took a look at the randonautica book to refresh my memory on what the different types mean, and I guess blind spots are “places outside your normal conscious awareness,” and this is what it says about attractors and voids:
ATTRACTORS AND VOIDS
The second way you can impact how you interact with the app is by
selecting whether you want an attractor point or a void point. To
understand what those are, let’s talk a little bit about the location
points that Randonautica generates.
Randonautica uses a special algorithm to generate random points all across your set radius. Some of the points end up close together in
a dense area (attractors) and some are spread out (voids). We refer to
these areas as “anomalies.” Anomalies are things that deviate from
what is typical, standard, or expected. To understand this on the scale
of real life, anomalies are events that are beyond coincidental and
make you take a step back, almost dumbfounded as to how they could
have occurred. In math, an anomaly is something that deviates to the
point where scientists might say something like “Wait a sec, that
shouldn’t be there.” This is the particular thing that Randonautica
looks for in its two sources of anomalies.
Attractors, points in the dense area, are often described as loca-
tions of “high energy,” but that’s not necessarily the case. Under-
standing how randomness operates and also how an attractor can be
found requires some imagination. Think of a 5-foot-long, 5-inch-
diam-eter clear PVC pipe. The PVC pipe is standing upright and will
act as the “tunnel” in this scenario. Poking through holes along the
pipe are hundreds of tubes, like the small tubes at the dentist office
that suck the spit out of your mouth. These tubes are blowing air at
different forces and unpredictable intervals. This creates a tunnel of
inconsistent airflow patterns. Now, let’s say a large handful of salt
gets poured into the pipe from the top of the tunnel opening. The salt
will travel down the tunnel, being stirred and unpredictably disrupted
by the blow tubes, and will ultimately land within the 5-inch circle at
the bottom. When the tunnel is removed, there is a 5-inch circle of salt
that remains.
Now imagine looking at this circle of salt, how scattered and incon-
sistent it should be—patternless, a mess. What the mathematical
computation that derives an attractor does is look for the anomaly in
the salt. It says, “Whoa, wait, there is a mound of salt here! This
shouldn’t have happened. It should be chaotically distributed.” Alter-
nate to the attractor is the void. It’s where the algorithm finds the least
amount of salt. “Well, look what we have here, a segment with no salt
at all!”
To relate this back to how the Randonautica app operates, the salt
granules represent the coordinates, the tunnel is the generator, and
the air is creating the entropy, or randomness. The Randonautica se-
cret algorithm, known as the Newton Library, is assessing your circle,
set as the radius on your map, and looking for the weirdest, most
statistically improbable way the “salt” overlaid itself. Essentially, the
app goes through an intricate mathematical process to get your pin-
point on your GPS. It’s a mysterious-yet-scientific way of finding loca-
tions that are hopefully ultra-special in some way to you and the area
around you.
You select within the app whether you want to go to an attractor
point or a void point. Which one you choose is totally up to you. Here
are some general thoughts about each one:
• Some people think that void spots are more eerie and airy
and really have the feeling of being void of energy. There
have been reports of voids having a higher despair rate or
an uneasy feeling. But then other people say that they like
voids for all sorts of positive reasons.
• Attractor points, on the other hand, have been known to
have a denser feeling and bring Randonauts to places with
lots of things to observe.
These observations could all be confirmation bias, of course, as
the words “attractor” and “void” have strong connotations. Regard-
less, they are two different types of trips, and you can experiment for
yourself with the effect of each type on your Randonauting adventures.