Randonautica book info on voids and anomalies
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.