Re: [question] On the topic of randomness.

[Fernando Salas <fsalas@fibertel.com.ar>]

Hi

    All that I read from the thread remind me two or three things.

    1) Chaos mathematical teory and fractals, perhaps those can help on
having  a less predictable seed or number generator.

    2) All u can do AFAIK with a computer will be pseudo-random as is alg
based, the randomness of the sequence will be determined in most part by the
seed randomness. Even if u use internal times , then that will be the same
between different runs excepts that the process take some data from the
external enviroment.

    3) An idea that just pop it is use LSBs of the higher performance counter
u have in the computer linked to an external event as the seed, for example
last mouse input timestamp. I think that could make it for games that u move a
lot the mouse. The counters runs at least at 1 ms presicion so the user will
never be able to reproduce the same seed(without special hardware), may also
be mixed with keyboard input, Network last ping time or whatever, using in all
cases the LSBs to have a good distribution. can be mixed then with chaos,
fractals, whatever.

Those are just thoughts and probably had a lot of flaws that must be worked
around to have a good behaviour alg.

Laguna Loire wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> A question that popped up as I was contemplating the randomness of the
> quick picks for those state lotteries:
>
> Just what exactly is randomness and can the level of randomness in a
> series of numbers or from the output of a generator be measured?
>
> Just wondering since I'm assuming that if one keeps drawing marbles from a
> bag, that the predictability of the marbles drawn eventually becomes
> predictable, and thus is no longer truly random. Ie, the randomness of the
> pool has been used up or reduced.
>
> So what exactly is randomness, can it be measured, and can the level of
> randomness be varied?
>
> Wing.
>
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