Can random acts be planned?

They might not know exactly what random act they are going to commit. I mean, anything could happen in each of the 50 States. They might help someone along the side of the road with a broken down car. They might find someone unable to pay their grocery bill. The intention is purposeful but the act itself may indeed be random because it depends on what they happen to find that particular day they are in the State.

I think you’re confusing random and spontaneous.

We typically use “random” in a relative, not absolute, sense. We accept that a coin toss is random because the way the coin falls is subject to circumstances beyond our control, but the toss of the coin was preceded by intentional and non-random actions. A decision was made to toss the coin and let the result of the toss determine how to proceed from there. So the process becomes random only as of the point that the coin is twirling in the air. Up to that point, intention was involved. In an absolute sense, either outcome—heads or tails—will be the result of the intentional decision to flip a coin.

Something similar can be said in the case of the newlyweds. They, in effect, have the intention of “flipping the coin” in each of the 50 states, letting circumstances beyond their control determine the details of how they will proceed. But the reality is that, unlike a coin toss, they will have more influence than they may recognize. Their own biases will be at work in how they respond (or decline to respond) to the situations they encounter, so the acts they perform will be reflective of a whole set of preconceptions.

Random or not, what a nice idea.

My company runs electronic auctions that are planned and determined, but are random in nature, in that the auctions expire after a random time period. The random timer runs between 500 milliseconds to 750 milliseconds.

So yes, one can plan for random events to occur.

If you decide to give £20 to the next old man you meet in the street the action is both planned and random as you have no idea who it is who will get the money.

I’m not confusing random and spontaneous. The people who they will help will be random people they do not know and did not plan to help out. The target will be a random person in need of help. It’s not very spontaneous at all, because they will be looking for some random person.

The word “random” doesn’t belong in the story, for sure.