Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.ai.philosophy,comp.ai.alife
From: stevem@comtch.iea.com (Steve McGrew)
Subject: Re: rand() - implementation ideas [Q]
Organization: New Light Industries, Ltd.
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In article <557a4i$s2e@zen.hursley.ibm.com>, Peter_Lupton@uk.ibm.com wrote:

>There is another concept of randomness which derives from the notion of
>'patternlessness'. The object to taking a finite sequence of bits from a
>diode as the epitome of randomness is that you could be unlucky and get
>all zeroes, say.

        In that last sentence, did you intend "object" to mean "purpose"?  Or 
did you mean "objection"?  Nobody should object to a random number generator 
that allows "unlucky" coincidences.  To prohibit unlucky coincidences would be 
to *reduce* the randomness of the RNG.
>
>Patternlessness has been explored, and there seems to be a consensus
>that incompressibility/maximal Algorithmic Complexity is what we mean
>by an intrinsically random patternless sequence of digits. [snip]

        If a long random sequence did not have a reasonable number of 
coincidental sub-patterns, I would suspect that the sequence had been 
tampered with!  A corollary to this view would be that most randomly generated 
sequences *are* compressible to some degree.


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