The perception of bubble spewing dinosaurs who eat cake

Question: Do you believe your fate is predetermined, or you have some free will?

Before I state my personal feeling, I want to talk about randomness for a minute.
First up, what ISN'T random. Well, Random Number Generators used by computers are, for the most part, completely deterministic.
Most of them work by having some large complicated mathematical expression, taking a seed from somewhere (say the clock, network traffic, keyboard input, temperature of processor, ect) and just seeing what comes out when it's plugged in. Although it's true that you don't personally know what number might come out when you first use the generator, it's just some equation. The "randomness" is actually just a lack of knowledge about the equation used, thus it's only random to you. Ignorance doesn't make something truly random. It simply creates the PERCEPTION of randomness.

Did anybody play the game "Bubble Bobble" as a kid? Holy crap, what a great game. Anyway, if you had played it, you might remember the "random" drops of items all over the game. Sometimes special food, like cake, would appear in a level. These delicious foods would, obviously, be worth WAY more than the regular food, like green peppers and cherries. Other times, a pair of running shoes would appear that would give you a speed boost! But sometimes, and it was really rare, you'd get these umbrellas that let you skip ahead a bunch of levels.
The funny thing about Bubble Bobble was that some kids always seemed to have all the luck. Some jerk neighbor kid was ALWAYS getting umbrellas. My little brother was always getting magical wands. Me? I just got the stupid letters. ALWAYS WITH THE LETTERS. Apparently they unlocked some big secret ending of the game, but they sure as crap didn't skip levels like the umbrella! Or let you shoot lightning out your butt like the wands did! Man, those letters sucked. Surely, I figured, the bubble bobble gods were frowning upon me.
Sadly, I know now it wasn't digital deities at all, rather it was all due to MY actions. See, Bubble Bobble did sort of a funny thing. It secretly kept very intricate records in it's memory of exactly how many times a player had say, jumped. Or how many times the player moved to the left... or the exact position on the screen the player was in when a level ended. Like a little digital Proteus, Bubble Bobble kept all this knowledge and used specific bits of it to feed the different random number generators used in the game! So that jerk neighbor wasn't lucky at getting umbrellas, he just had an unnatural obsession with jumping on water bubbles. And my bro just happened to run around the screen a lot, so obviously, the game was giving him running shoes! See, once you start to see the variables the game uses for various items "random" spawn rates, they all kinda make sense! As a kid, you were just living in the perception of randomness. In truth, it was only determinism. Infuriating, sweaty palmed, controller throwing determinism. Nothing more.

Fun game though!

Anyway, I probably believe in free will. It just feels right. And yet, if there is one thing a 20 year old video game has taught me, it's that sometimes experiences that APPEAR random and unconnected are actually based on past variables I never realized were even important. How many times you jump, how far you walk to the left, what you had for breakfast, the color of your shirt, boxers or briefs. Maybe it's all just feedback loops, and if we only knew the equation we'd be able to predict the future. Wait, wasn't this the theme from the movie "Pi"? Crap, it might have been. Of course, that movie might also have been about how you shouldn't trust the Jews with powerful computers or mathematicians with power drills. Weird movie.

Now before you go thinking that Astrology or Darren Aronofsky were onto something, let me tell you how to make an ACTUAL random number generator. You will need:

1. a smoke detector
2. a ridiculous amount of free time

Basic smoke detector operation involves a little radioactive source that is emitting alpha particles. Near to the source is a little sensor which is designed to pick up the alpha particles, and count how many it's seen in the last couple seconds. "But Bunny D, what of the radiation?" you ask me with a sense of urgency. "Do not fear," I begin reassuringly, "these particles are of such low energy that just a few inches of air is enough to effectively block them". And see, that's EXACTLY how the smoke detector works! If smoke happens to wander up into the thing, the little alpha particles will be unable to make the centimeter trip to the sensor, as the atoms in the smoke block them all out. After a few seconds, the sensor says "hey, I haven't seen any particles in a while, better make a fuss" and then things get rather loud and you know that your cake should have been taken out of the oven a while ago.

See, interesting thing about radioactive sample decay. For a large enough sample (like of the source used in a smoke detector) using the mystical powers of science, we know that on average a certain number of decays are going to occur (each decay producing an alpha particle). How accurate is this predictable decay rate? Well, is your smoke detector going off right now for no reason? Then pretty good, I'd say.
Ok, but what about on the atomistic scale? See, that's where things get crazy, for even though we know that a small sample is going to have a certain number of decays in a period of time, we have NO IDEA when an individual atom is going to decay. You can't just stare at and say "I think this one will be ripe in like a week". If you pick any atom at random in your smoke detector, it might decay in the next 2 seconds or it might not decay for the next 7000 years. We really don't know!

These atoms represent TRUE RANDOMNESS on an individual scale, and yet incredible predictability taken as a group. Weird!

Oh, so if you wanted to make that random number generator, you'd write a little program that just went,

"1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ... ect",

over and over as fast as it could. Assuming you haven't gotten too distracted by the internet at this point, you'd wire your smoke detector to it and set it up so that whenever the sensor of the smoke detector notices a "ping" of an alpha decay detection, it saves the number that the "counting" program is on at that very instant into a file. Later, you can just open that file and go down the list of numbers, which would all be truly random.

And yea, not only do people do this, they write sets of random numbers onto DVD's, and sell them to scientists. We buy them. We pay a lot. We're smart, and we deserve a good set of professionally constructed random numbers. SCIENCE!

In summery:

Bubble Bobble = Not Random
Smoke Detectors Duck Taped to Computers = Random
Life = ?

Personally, I don't know. What I do know, with absolute certainty, is that the theme song to Bubble Bobble is stuck in my head. I could keep talking about this subject all day, but an angry white whale is about the chase me around the room.