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CrowdScience listener Dorit has a problem. She wants the tiles in her new bathroom to be arranged randomly but, no matter what they do, it still looks like they form some kind of pattern.

This has got Dorit thinking about randomness – what is it, how do you create it, why do we find it so hard to recognise, and is anything really random at all? And if nothing is truly random, does it mean that everything is theoretically predictable? Tiling your bathroom is a much more existential problem than you might have thought.

Never afraid of a question, whether big (is everything pre-determined?) or small (how do I tile my bathroom?), CrowdScience is on the case.

Anand Jagatia heads to Geneva to meet Hugo Duminil-Copin, a mathematician who specialises in probability theory. On the top floor of an old bank in this city of old banks, Hugo has Anand flipping an imaginary coin in a random order. Hugo explains that randomness is something that cannot be predicted by any means – so why is it so easy for Hugo to guess what Anand’s next move is?

Meanwhile, at the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland USA, Susan Wardle is a cognitive neuroscientist who specialises in face pareidolia – the tendency that humans have to see faces in things. Can neuroscience help Dorit with her tiling problem, and is there a reason why the human brain likes to put random objects into some kind of order?

Geneva is also the birthplace of the first Quantum Random Number Generator for smartphones, so CrowdScience has persuaded some of Geneva’s finest quantum physicists to hook a photon detector up to a synthesiser. That means we can actually hear quantum particles behaving randomly - but is quantum randomness really random, or is it just a pattern that we haven’t yet discovered? And could quantum physics help Dorit tile her bathroom?