Mal ,'Bushwhacked'
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.
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.
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....
DX, you're Catholic, right?
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!
you're sposed to flip to a random page
But then you're doing the work!
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
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.
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.
What if you rip the pages out of the binding and throw them up into the air a whole bunch of times?
Are we random yet?
Are we?
Are we?
What if you rip the pages out of the binding and throw them up into the air a whole bunch of times?
All the physicists come down the hall and snigger.