Researchers recently decided to see how many Lego bricks end up stuck together after they've all been spun, naturally. To see what "complexes arise" when you tumble those bricks they created "a primitive analog Monte Carlo agent."
Monte Carlo procedures are ways of using algorithms to map everything that might happen in a complex event, then determine from that which events are most likely to happen. Spin enough bricks and you could chart the probability of which bricks get stuck together.
So they put a whole bucket of old Lego bricks (from the late 1960's and the early 1970's) into a Miele(TM) washing machine. The bricks were treated for 70 minutes, at 40 degree Celsius, without speed spinning at the end, without washing powder.
Think that is some waste of time, like "studies" of Everquest or government-funded analyses of dating site data? Not at all, this is the kind of experiment anyone in science would be proud to write about.
Advanced Mathematics With Legos In A Washing Machine By Colin Lecher, Popular Science
