|
I tried to communicate this once and apparently I failed. I'll try again, with some quotes from the website:
People working with computers often sloppily talk about their system's "random number generator" and the "random numbers" it produces. But numbers calculated by a computer through a deterministic process, cannot, by definition, be random.
Sloppy indeed. Good thing there are people who can tell real random numbers from fake ones.
with genuinely random numbers, knowledge of one number or an arbitrarily long sequence of numbers is of no use whatsoever in predicting the next number to be generated.
Of course the writer overlooked the fact that if you don't know the algorithm, or cannot control its output, you would never be able to tell that numbers generated by a computer are not "genuinely random". Not in a million years.
A variety of clever algorithms have been developed which generate sequences of numbers which pass every statistical test used to distinguish random sequences from those containing some pattern or internal order.
So if it passes the test and you know the algorithm, it's "pseudo-random". If it passes the test and you don't know the algorithm, it's "genuinely random". That can only mean one thing: the easiest way to turn a pseudo-random number generator into a genuine one is to forget how you made it.
Either I'm missing something or these folks are incapable of thinking. Can't they see the obvious?
if you run this program on data generated by a high-quality pseudorandom sequence generator, you'll find it generates data that are indistinguishable from a sequence of bytes chosen at random. Indistinguishable, but not genuinely random.
That is, indistinguishable but different. One wonders where the difference is.
HotBits is an Internet resource that brings genuine random numbers, generated by a process fundamentally governed by the inherent uncertainty in the quantum mechanical laws of nature
Well, it's good to know that God is not a sloppy computer programmer and that quantum mechanics is "genuinely random". After all, QM has passed those statistical tests they use to tell the difference between true random numbers and numbers that only look random to a naive observer.
My oh my! If that's what the top minds are doing, I'm glad I'm an idiot!
|
