| Title | : | Randomize |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Kindle Edition |
| Number of Pages | : | 28 |
| Publication | : | First published September 17, 2019 |
An IT whiz at the Babylon Casino is enlisted to upgrade security for the game of keno and its random-number generator. The new quantum computer system is foolproof. But someone on the inside is no fool. For once the odds may not favor the house—unless human ingenuity isn’t entirely a thing of the past.
Andy Weir’s Randomize is part of Forward, a collection of six stories of the near and far future from out-of-this-world authors. Each piece can be read or listened to in a single thought-provoking sitting.
Randomize Reviews
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For no real reason, I decided to read through the
Forward collection in order of length, starting with the shortest. That made
Randomize the first story I read. And I have to say-- I almost stopped. Nothing about this made me want to read on.
Thankfully, I did read on. Mostly because authors like
Blake Crouch and
N.K. Jemisin contributed to the collection. I can now say that
Randomize was by far my least favourite story. It felt almost as if Weir didn't even try.
I got my partner to read this too because I wondered if all the discussion of quantum computing was more interesting to a techie computer geek, but he shares my opinion. That opinion being that this story was so dry and dull. Weir spends the first half geeking out about coding and computing, never developing any of the characters, and then the second half just fizzles out. I got to the end and was like "Is that it?"
Cold, distant characters, boring story. By far the least interesting and least engaging of the six, in my opinion.
Ark by Veronica Roth -
⭑⭑⭑☆☆
Emergency Skin by N.K. Jemisin -
⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑
You Have Arrived at Your Destination by Amor Towles -
⭑⭑⭑⭑☆
The Last Conversation by Paul Tremblay -
⭑⭑⭑⭑☆
Summer Frost by Blake Crouch -
⭑⭑⭑⭑☆ -
Thankfully this is not my first book at this series because if I start with that, I probably give up on them! This is the most boring, dullest, meaningless story I’ve read from the Forward collection. It is written in quantum mechanics bla bla bla language, (most of the words of it went in my one ear and out the other one!) exhausted me so much. I was so disturbed to take a nap and get a break. I felt like I was trapped in a place keeps playing the same death metal song in high volume over and over again. (This must be worst version of Russian Doll series! You die over and over again at the very same night and find yourself at the same bathroom, looking yourself in the mirror as the same song plays…)
So the book I expected to love so much cannot be reach at this moment. (I think it’s trapped in a tunnel with more likable, better developed characters and more interesting story!)
I didn’t like the story. I didn’t like the way the author told the story. I didn’t like the characters. But I’m happy with the ending because the story finally ended and I can delete the book from my kindle and forget it forever! Yaaaayyyy! One more reason to drink one more chilled glass of Chardonnay! (Everybody sends me Carol Kane’s “Chardonnay Lady” gif from the movie “Dead Don’t Die” and I highly deserve this nickname!)
This is most boring and dry book of the series. I thought I’m going to devour all of them and have so much fun but even Martian’s author can disappoint me which is not a first. (Actually I didn’t enjoy “Artemis”, too)
So let’s leave two stars and get the hell out of here for a better reading ASAP! -
Racist
Randomize is racist and cringingly so. Out of all of the people in the world that Andy Weir could have made the bad guy, he has to pick on the brown woman?
I live in Troy, Michigan where there is a very heavy Indian population. Troy is routinely rated as one of the safest cities in Michigan. Is that a coincidence? No.
Oh and guess which country is the largest user of GoodReads aside from the United States? India. Out of the top 10 global cities using GoodReads, four of them are in India—Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, and New Delhi.
https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
So why, oh why, did the “bad guy” have to be a brown woman?
नस्लवादी
रैंडमाइज नस्लवादी है और गंभीर रूप से ऐसा है। दुनिया के सभी लोगों में से जिसे एंडी वियर बुरा आदमी बना सकता था, उन्होंने भूरी महिला को ही क्यों चुना?
मैं ट्रॉय, मिशिगन में रहती हूं जहां भारतीय आबादी काफी ज्यादा है। ट्रॉय को नियमित रूप से मिशिगन के सबसे सुरक्षित शहरों में स�� एक माना जाता है। क्या यह एक संयोग है? नहीं।
ओह, और अंदाज़ लगाइए कि अमेरीका के अलावा कौनसा देश गुडरीड्स का सबसे बड़ा उपयोगकर्ता है? भारत! गुडरीड्स का उपयोग करने वाले शीर्ष 10 वैश्विक शहरों में से चार शहर भारत में हैं - मुंबई, दिल्ली, पुणे और नई दिल्ली।
तो क्यों, ओह क्यों, "बुरे आदमी" को एक भूरी महिला होनी थी?
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2.5 stars. Dazzling science can't make up for a mundane plot. Full review first posted on
Fantasy Literature:
Nick Chen is an IT guy on a mission: when quantum computers become available to consumers, he tries to convince the managers at the Babylon Hotel and Casino where he works to shut down their keno lounge, knowing that quantum computers can quickly crack the random-number generators of the keno game system. When he fails to persuade them, he uses his override passwords to shut down the keno game, which quickly gets the attention of Edwin Rutledge, the head of the casino. Eventually convinced by Chen’s arguments, Rutledge authorizes Chen to buy the casino its own quantum computer for $300,000 (“We fight quantum with quantum”).
A couple of days later, a new QuanaTech quantum computer is delivered and installed by a salesman, Chen sets up airtight security systems around it, and all is now well with the Babylon keno game … or, perhaps not. It turns out that the QuanaTech salesman is married to a brilliant physicist, who has an idea for an ingenious way to game the system.
Andy Weir is still riding on the coattails of
The Martian's fame, but I’m getting dubious that he’ll ever recapture that same magic. Randomize doesn’t do it. Weir tries to dazzle your eyes with lots of geeky science talk about quantum computing and pseudorandom number generation and entangled qbits, and how that would affect the massive Las Vegas gambling industry. But once you clear away all the sparkly physics details, at its heart this is just a heist story, and not a particularly compelling one.
Weir does give his characters a few memorable characteristics: Rutledge is deeply status-conscious and mistrusts anyone who won’t drink with him; the QuanaTech salesman and his wife, Prashant and Sumi Singh, are an Indian couple in an arranged marriage that has worked out rather well, but they want to escape their financial worries; Nick Chen is a nerd who cares about his new quantum computer more than his co-workers’ — or his own — comfort. However, the characterization feels perfunctory; with the exception of Sumi, the characters are all readily recognizable types. The heist plan is overly-complex from a physics point of view but the actual execution of the plan is so simple as to be an eyebrow-raiser. The ending of this novella was amusing but underwhelming.
Randomize is part of the FORWARD collection proposed and curated by Blake Crouch. It’s a set of six stand-alone novellas, each by a different author, that explore the “effects of a pivotal technological moment.” The authors are Crouch, N.K. Jemisin, Veronica Roth, Amor Towles, Paul Tremblay and Andy Weir. The individual novellas are reasonably priced and available in ebook and audio form individually or as a set. -
This one was by far my least favorite of the Forward Collection.
2 stars is generous. -
So, what's not to love about this one:
- quantum computers getting into quantum entanglement
- a PHD genius
- casino woes
What I didn't really like is that the PHD wife's brains were being slowly pickled as what, stay-at-home mom without any science involvement? Maybe I missed smth. Or maybe it's our society that misses something: half the population's potential.
The woe's with the society and not with AW. So, it's still an excellent read. Even if somewhat naïve one. -
Enjoyable short story that has to do with a Las Vegas casino, quantum computers, and more. A quick and clever read!
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2,5 * - This was just a big "meh" story for me.
-
Short and sweet - 4 stars
Not too much to say about a 40 minute audiobook. An enjoyable short story speculating on how improvements in science and technology could allow for the defeat of the random number generator and what that could mean for the gambling industry. An Ocean's 2 or 3, if you will.
Weir does pretty good in giving enough background, build-up, and climax within a very short period of time. I could easily find myself enjoying many short stories like this . . . luckily they have 5 others in the series so I can! -
Rating: 4.25* of five
I do so love a heist story with a happy ending. Like, a lot. *happy sigh*
And when the crisis came, I found myself thinking, "howinahell could {the sleazeball character} say no?" Luckily no was not said. -
Damn it no! Sigh...
Mel 🖤🐶🐺🐾 -
A shoddy short story, with people talking and exposing plans like cartoon bad guys
Definitely the most underwhelming of the Forward Stories Collection in my opinion, up till now.
Randomize covers gambling, quantum computing and a heist. And still it was very boring in my view.
I still don’t know what keno is, nor what quantum entanglement would specifically entail and finally I don’t understand why a prodigy in quantum computing would need to pull of a heist (instead of working for a Silicon Valley company and make millions there) to get some cash.
Fortunately, to paraphrase
Andy Weir’s characters who apparently feel the same, I don’t really need to know any of this, and thus the author also does not have to bother to write an interesting or well written story:
”Fortunately, the long-term memory comes pre-superpositioned. The system will skip the Hadamard operation on first use.”
“I didn’t understand that at all.”
“All that matters is that the system has a minor performance optimization that creates the security hole we’re going to take advantage of.” -
For a short story about a heist this sure was boring as hell. It read like a textbook entry on quantum whatever interspersed with random characters to use as talking heads to relay this information. It had lots of promise, but I’m sad to say it didn’t work for me at all.
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[1/5 stars] Mini Review: Upon finishing this short story for a published review, my first thought was: “what the hell did I just read?” My second was “where have I seen this author before?” Um, yeah, it’s the author who wrote the well-know book “The Martian.” I had to reconcile the seemingly pointless story with the weight behind a name like that. I haven’t read the The Martian yet, but I’m surprise he took the direction of hacking casino systems instead of something even more futuristic. I could definitely see a scientific thinker behind the words while reading, which now makes me think I’ll love the Martian even more, but the story left me feeling kind of “meh.” And I think the only reason is that I didn’t find the subject matter particularly interesting. There are so many heist stories now, you have to have a lot of fun with them to gain any traction, and this one was very straight-laced. It also delved into heavy technical description which almost made my eyes roll back into my head a few times. It was close. Overall, I’m interested in the brain behind this story enough to read more works from Weir, but I could’ve happily passed on this one.
Via The Obsessive Bookseller at
www.NikiHawkes.com -
This one seems to be the least liked of the Forward collection but honestly, I liked it. It's a short story about mathematics and quantum computers by a writer who likes science. I thought it was enjoyable. Not too tech-y. A snarky ending. A jab at folks viewed as much smarter than the average human etc.
4 Stars
Listened on Audible. Narration by Janina Garvankar was very good! -
“We fight quantum with quantum.”
Meh. Sadly, just meh.
Geeking out can be quite awesome, but this story left me cold.
Maybe it would have worked as an intro chapter to a larger story, with the ideas expanded on and the characters developed - but in its current form it’s just dull.
—————————
The Forward Collection, in the order read:
‘Emergency Skin’ by N.K. Jemisin:
Lovely. 5 stars.
‘Randomize’ by Andy Weir:
Meh. 2 stars.
‘The Last Conversation’ by Paul Tremblay:
Eerie. 4 stars.
‘You Have Arrived at Your Destination’ by Amor Towles:
Perfectly adequate. 3 stars.
‘Summer Frost’ by Blake Crouch:
Very intelligent (artificially?). 4.5 stars.
‘Ark’ by Veronica Roth:
Underwhelming melancholy. 2.5 stars. -
Rating: 2.5/5.0
Genre:
Science Fiction + Novella
For a short book that does not exceed 30 pages, this was not good. The first 50% felt as if I was reading a manual of how a computer works! Blah blah blah, chips, CPUs, Quantum BS and so on!
The other 50% was basically exposing the plan the engineer & his wife had to rob the Casino's money by its owner and making him an offer so he would not hand them to the police! The second half was better but that does not excuse how bad and uninteresting the first part was.
This is the last and the worst book in this series!
Available on Kindle Unlimited -
A pretty short and, frankly, pretty average story about a couple trying to cheat a casino out of money by using a quantum computer to give them access to "random" ticket numbers.
Dull and devoid of Andy Weir's characteristic humor, this is a highly forgettable story. -
I enjoyed this, but not as much as the others in this series.
There didn't seem to be much point to it, but I did like how it ended up. -
Needed something short to listen to in the gym during my workout and it turns out that these stories are perfect for that.
This is a collection of scifi short stories curated by Blake Crouch (himself a great scifi author), bringing together some of the most well-known names of the genre, each depicting a pivotal moment in technological advancement and a consequence they see in it.
One such well-known author contributing here is Andy Weir, who catapulted himself to fame with his novel The Martian (which was really fantastic IMO).
In this story, we are in Las Vegas and quantum computers change the aspects of gambling as much as of the rest of the world. A couple try to take advantage of it, motivated by the wife's hyperintelligence. Will they be able to trick the casino? Will maths and logic and even technology fail her?
I decided to read this collection in the audio format since Amazon/Audible assembled an incredible cast to bring these futuristic worlds to life. This story was read by actress Janina Gavankar who killed it with the Anglo-Indian accent.
A really cool story, presented in a really cool way. Can't wait to read the others. -
3.5 stars
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4.5 Stars for Randomize (ebook) by Andy Weir.
This is interesting short story where super smart people take on Las Vegas. But are they as smart as they think they are? Maybe? -
A nice little story about random numbers (obviously), but what you might not know is that it's also a closed time-like loop that completely eliminates the random element, EVEN WHEN we're dealing with a truly random quantum processor. (Or at least we've established this in the story-concept, with one single exception.)
Am I geeking out a little?
Possibly. :)
This is a pretty sharp cookie. -
This 28 page short story is part of the Forward Collection which was curated by Blake Crouch which at time of posting is available on Kindle Unlimited.
This book is about computer coding and tech isn't my thing however credit where credits due, the author did a fairly good job of explaining and I understood the jist of it. Kind of. Which is why this is my least favourite in the collection, I don't think I got the full value out of it. I did like the authors writing style though so I will try one of his other books in the future. -
3 stars! ⭐️⭐️⭐️
I think Randomize was the weakest short story in the whole Forward series.
It was still entertaining and I liked the concept of the plot.
The location was a plus for me. Viva Las Vegas!
I wish I was there right now losing money to slot machines and drinking too many cocktails.
But I regress...
Here’s the thing...
The math and quantum physics in this made me feel stoopid. I didn’t understand the concept on how to steal from a casino. 🤷🏼♀️🤣😂
If your Will Hunting and studying at MIT at the moment, you’ll get this in a second. Pick up this short story and try your hand at some Keno numbers! -
2 stars ⭐️⭐️
Hmmm. This was my first experience with Andy Weir. It wasn't terrible, but it was pretty bad. The writing seemed both overly simplistic and juvenile, while also being a bit of a quantum theory word dump. It felt clunky and awkward, as if written by a very inexperienced author. I think my favorite awkward moment was when the Indian wife was talking about quantum stuff, and then we get this random interjection about Indian clothing.
“The 707 does a coherence self-check once a week. When you install the system, make sure those settings are set to do the self-check this Sunday night at 11:58 p.m.”
She adjusted her sari. American clothes certainly looked nice on Americans, but she preferred traditional clothing. ���The self-check takes about five minutes. During that time, if the system is asked to do qbit operations, it uses the qbits in the long-term storage unit because the normal RAM is busy."
Lol what? It was as if he felt he needed to throw in something related to Indian culture, and picked this random paragraph to talk about saris. Anyway, there's not much to the plot, and the characterization of the casino owner was paper thin. Not sure I'm inclined to pick up any of Weir's full-length novels. -
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I think short stories need to really pack a punch. If you're only reading something for 20-30 minutes, it should make an impression.
This did not do that. It's pretty meh.
This spent so much time trying to explain quantum computing and entanglement to the reader that it forgot to tell you anything interesting.
I don't know that there was a point to this at all, other than maybe Vegas casinos fucking gamblers over? Something like that.
When I got to the last sentence, I thought, "that's it?" I'm sure that's not the reaction you want people to have.
⭐⭐⭐ | 3 stars. Whatever. -
So... What was the point of all this?
-
This Review ✍️
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★ I like this one but it felt so clinical, cold and geeky!
★ I can understand many readers not liking this one because it was smart, too smart maybe! I think it should have been a bit longer with focus on the characters but the author was geeking out over numbers and quantum physics!
★ If I was a professor and wanted my students to understand probabilities and quantum physics, I would use this one! Worth giving a chance anyway!
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The plot was only kind of interesting and the characters had no depth.
