Posts Tagged ‘Experiment’

A Failed Experiment on Simulated Randomness

Posted: 12th June 2010 by Andrew Brown in Nonfiction
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Observations

  • Random number generators (RNGs) try to simulate real-world randomness.
  • It is impossible for a computer to truly “generate” something random.
  • Flipping a coin ten times and getting a mixture of heads and tails looks more random than getting all heads or all tails.

Question

  • Does an RNG base its generated numbers off of previously-generated numbers to make the results look more random to the human eye?

RNG Test Study

Posted: 11th June 2010 by Andrew Brown in Nonfiction
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#!/usr/bin/perl

# This program aims to explore the inherent flaws with a pseudorandom
# generator that is designed to “look” random. In the real world, flipping
# a coin ten times has an equal chance of resulting in ten heads as it does
# some mixture of heads and tails.