this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
111 points (97.4% liked)

Technology

68244 readers
3815 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] DancingBear@midwest.social 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

For a number to be truly random (assuming positive integers) wouldn’t it have to be anywhere between 1 and infinity? What good is a 20 million digit long integer? Or a 103 billion digit long integer?

What I mean is, is it possible to even have a truly random number within a set of rules, say 1-100?

I guess I already gave a rule by saying positive integers, I don’t know this is crazy!

But have you ever come up with a random number on weeeeeeeeed, mannnnn

[–] scratchee@feddit.uk 7 points 6 days ago (2 children)

If you select a number “fairly” (ie every number equally likely, not skewed towards smaller numbers) and your scale goes to infinity, I’m pretty sure the number you get out will be infinitely long, almost always (sure, you could get the number 10, but infinity is… infinite, so any number that gets picked will tend to be beyond anything we ever experience or know how to write down)

To put it another way, using your scheme, we’d only ever need 1 random number ever, it’d just keep printing forever and we could cut up chunks of it whenever we needed some random and it would just keep printing on and on.

[–] SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

The issue is no random number generator can be truely random because the number will always be seeded by something that isn't technically random

Even cloudflare came up with a pretty "random" method of seeding their encryption keys with a wall of lava lamps, but even the program that takes the video feed of their lava lamps can theoretically be reverse engineered to process the same feed of lava lamps the same way to get the same results.

[–] DancingBear@midwest.social 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

That’s like the subsets of infinity which are also infinite? I’ve seen videos online that are really interesting to me but I’m no mathematician

[–] scratchee@feddit.uk 1 points 6 days ago

Pretty much, yeah. If you assume the number will be somewhere “in the middle”, then pick any number to be in the middle of 0 and infinity, you’ll always find you can double the number and still not be at infinity, so eventually you have to conclude that the halfway point is also infinity.