Name: Randomize
Rating: 3.122950819672131 (61 reviews)

Andy Weir

Randomize

Phil

Randomize is a fun, short, clever heist story centered on a professional casino robbery with a smart reversal at the end.<br />Like Weir's novels, it's about watching intelligent people solve problems under pressure. It's a fast-paced thought experiment about what happens when perfect planning collides with true randomness.

rumbledethumps

C. J. Daley 

This is part of the Amazon Original ‘Forward Collection’ curated by Blake Crouch. I loved The Martian and really liked Artemis. This kind of fits right in for them as a futuristic science story. These are available through prime for free on kindle or audible! 

This one is very straight forward. It deals with a new super computer that would allow for the gambling scene to be entirely ripped off. Pseudo-number randomizers can be hacked through this new process, allowing the cheating to appear like genuine wins, indistinguishable. When an IT guy catching this, saving his casino millions, it’s too bad that not everyone is as clean. 

This was perhaps my least favorite of the Forward Collection if I’m honest. The short story features a total of perhaps three scenes, and they are all very simple. Two of which are very similar. I did like that Weir uses his signature style of heavily delivering on the science though. It just felt a little flat. 

Personally a 3/5*, just not as deep or hard hitting as the others.

Audrey Lord

Wow

That was fucking brilliant. Even in 27 pages Weir can write in depth characters and draw you in completely. I can not wait for another novel by him

Jeff James

This is a solid sci-fi heist that relies on an old-fashioned what-if premise: What would happen if quantum computers existed, and how long would it take before someone figured out the criminal applications?

In this case, an enterprising engineer figures out how to defeat the random number generators at a casino and complications ensue. There isn’t a lot of plot to this story, since it’s mostly a thought experiment hung on a little bit of narrative, but the execution is well-done and I enjoyed reading it.

Randomize wasn’t amazing, but it was possibly my favorite from the Forward collection so far.

Nat Welch

Olivera Mitić

2.5/5🌟

Ako pljačkaš kazino valjda prvo proveriš da li rade background check kad neko pobedi ili ti bar padne na pamet da je to opcija, ffs 🙄

Michelle Xu

The Forward Collection Overall, 3.5 stars.

It's hard to give the overall collection a rating because some stories were hits and others were misses.

Randomise - 1.5 stars
Ugh. SO disappointed that this was how the collection ended. Just don't read this one. I would have given this whole story collection a solid 4 stars if it weren't for this story. Literally... what was the point of this short story? Did I learn anything? I literally just do not understand what the point of this short story was. There was nothing about it that made me feel anything. It was just a jumble of words trying to describe quantum computing and then a casino plot on the side with some stereotyping of east Asian and Indian characters. That was it. Maybe it's not even a 2 star, maybe it's a 1 star. I mean I guess I didn't actively hate it or any of the characters, just it was so short and there was no point.

B. K.

A quick heist story for computer nerds, with excellent audio narration by Janina Gavankar. Although it's puzzling that the supergenius at the heart of the story appears to be unemployed. Why is she not inventing things and becoming a billionaire in her own right?

Juliana Matias

So for my third story in this collection, I went for something far less apocalyptic, and which I cannot be sure can even be classified as science fiction. I mean, quantum computers are/will be a thing, aren’t they? I don’t know, I’m not fully computer-literate, so this might as well be real life.

Anyway, this story follows a casino on the day quantum computing becomes a popularized thing and it discusses how this could impact gambling machines since no computer-based random generator is really random at all. It was instructive.

The story itself has a bit of a twist, which I found quite ingenious, but overall it was fine as a story. I enjoyed it well enough.

Randomize

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