Bethany
Empress of Light
A really, really random fact about me: I once built four tiny computers, each with a different RNG, and ran simple games like Nim on them. At the time I thoughtbelieved that they showed different playing styles. Now I realize I was anthropomorphizing simple, random behaviors.
When I say each of the four had a different random number generator, in truth only one produced truly random numbers. Three ran variously simple or sophisticated pseudo-random number generators, the sort that's used in nearly all software.
The fourth computer was connected to a hilarious Rube Goldberg machine made of a crudely repaired Geiger counter that reset a free-running binary counter whenever it detected an alpha particle. Since radioactive decay is completely unpredictable, unlike the random-seeming but in fact perfectly predictable output of a pseudo-random algorithm, that one machine out of all I've ever owned created and used truly random numbers.
Fun but pointless. It turns out being able to re-run a given sequence of pseudo-random numbers is too useful an ability to forego. I've never used a similar rig since, just depend on the Mersenne Twister and other cool RNG algos everyone else uses.
As one of my friends might say, "Ferrell's so literal-minded. You ask for random, she's gonna give you random."
When I say each of the four had a different random number generator, in truth only one produced truly random numbers. Three ran variously simple or sophisticated pseudo-random number generators, the sort that's used in nearly all software.
The fourth computer was connected to a hilarious Rube Goldberg machine made of a crudely repaired Geiger counter that reset a free-running binary counter whenever it detected an alpha particle. Since radioactive decay is completely unpredictable, unlike the random-seeming but in fact perfectly predictable output of a pseudo-random algorithm, that one machine out of all I've ever owned created and used truly random numbers.
Fun but pointless. It turns out being able to re-run a given sequence of pseudo-random numbers is too useful an ability to forego. I've never used a similar rig since, just depend on the Mersenne Twister and other cool RNG algos everyone else uses.
As one of my friends might say, "Ferrell's so literal-minded. You ask for random, she's gonna give you random."