Mmm....Pi.....
So that's my dream. That and some stuff about cigars and a tunnel.
Faith ,'Get It Done'
Natter 34: Freak With No Name
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
Aims - Apr 01, 2005 9:13:27 am PST #2328 of 10001
Shit's all sorts of different now.
Betsy HP - Apr 01, 2005 9:13:39 am PST #2329 of 10001
If I only had a brain...
is it even possible to create long strings of truly random numbers?
Yip. The standard method used to be measuring radioactive decay; dunno what it is nowadays.
Nutty - Apr 01, 2005 9:13:59 am PST #2330 of 10001
"Mister Spock is on his fanny, sir. Reports heavy damage."
is it even possible to create long strings of truly random numbers?
I read a short story once where a guy, trying to talk to God, hooked up a letter-generating computer program to the random decay of Plutonium atoms. After a while, God called him up and told him to lay off with the pressure because it was annoying.
Sean K - Apr 01, 2005 9:14:02 am PST #2331 of 10001
You can't leave me to my own devices; my devices are Nap and Eat. -Zenkitty
Eh, he's an old man. Giving him a boost up is the polite thing to do.
Okay, now I'm wondering if this comment makes DX more hell-bound, or less....
Aims - Apr 01, 2005 9:14:46 am PST #2332 of 10001
Shit's all sorts of different now.
DX, you're Catholic, right?
Sean K - Apr 01, 2005 9:16:08 am PST #2333 of 10001
You can't leave me to my own devices; my devices are Nap and Eat. -Zenkitty
You mean like, Pi?
Like the book, it's a fixed set, and becomes semi-unrandom.
After a while, God called him up and told him to lay off with the pressure because it was annoying.
BWAHAHAHA!
§ ita § - Apr 01, 2005 9:19:49 am PST #2334 of 10001
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.
you're sposed to flip to a random page
But then you're doing the work!
Betsy HP - Apr 01, 2005 9:21:03 am PST #2335 of 10001
If I only had a brain...
Actually, you can't flip to a random page, because of the nature of book bindings. You're much more likely to flip to the dead middle than to pages on the extremes, and over time the binding becomes creased and naturally opens to specific sections
-t - Apr 01, 2005 9:21:29 am PST #2336 of 10001
I am a woman of various inclinations and only some of the time are they to burn everything down in frustration
Like the book, it's a fixed set, and becomes semi-unrandom.
It's fixed, but it's infinitely long so you can always just move down to an as yet unused stretch of randomosity. Like the Mad Hatter's tea party.
Rick - Apr 01, 2005 9:21:42 am PST #2337 of 10001
If even computers can't really create strings of random numbers, is it even possible to create long strings of truly random numbers?
Sean is forcing me to air the dirty laundry. The Rand numbers (from the book) were generated by computers with lots of arcane (and probably irrelvant) steps to ensure that they are really random. It turns out that you need more than a million numbers to prove that an almost random sequence is not truly random , so the Rand numbers are pretty well safe from falsification. Number sequences from PCs are not. People have just given up and started calling them pseudo-random sequences. Good enough.
Of course, I'm a psychologist, so even the things I'm trying to measure systematically turn out to be pretty close to random much of the time. It's really only and issue in sciences that have, uh, made more progress than we have.