Guys, it is always a great pleasure to read you all. I had skipped this thead completely believing that it was useless to disucss about randomness since whatever pattern you would consider random was instead, as I said, a pattern, and therefore the only way to find out if the empeg was actually randomizing was to get the code.
Instead, this beautiful discussion was going on and I was missing it. Ok, I learned the lesson, never skip a thread on the empeg bbs.

So, just for the sake of the discussion, I think we should remember that randomness does not really exist in the universe. A random output is just the outcome of a number of causes and effects that are uncontrollable and impossible to track and calculate by us poor human beings.
I'm sure you remember the beautiful illustration of the chaos theory in Jurassic Park (book or movie): IF we let a drop of water fall on the back of our hand, there's no way to know on which side it will fall on the ground, unless we calculate the wind, blood pressure, pulses of the nervous system, our emotional status, rotation fo the earth, lights around, and all the billions of factors that determine the reasons why the drop choses this path rarher than another one.
IF we could calculate and compute everyhting, we would get rid of randomness and predict perfectly the outcome. But it is too difficult. we can't . So we have to face and accept "unpredictability" .

My point is that there's no such thing as a random number generator. There is just something that can give us the impression that there is no pattern, which is an illusion in the first place. And, as we could see here, i'st an illusion we tend not to believe in, since e see patterns everywhere!

Ok, that's it with my purely "academic" (and probably wrong) contribution to the discussion. Sorry if I bored you, but was just fascinated by the issue


Edited by taym (16/06/2003 18:03)
_________________________
= Taym =
MK2a #040103216 * 100Gb *All/Colors* Radio * 3.0a11 * Hijack = taympeg