** Chris Oattes <mailinglist@???> [2008-05-15 00:14]:
> Hugo Mills said the following on 14/05/08 23:46:
> >On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 11:37:33PM +0100, Chris Oattes wrote:
> >>Nick Chalk said the following on 14/05/08 22:56:
> >>>Peter Alefounder <p_alefounder@???> wrote:
> >>>>Why are pseudo-random numbers used anyway? Is it
> >>>>beyond the wit of man to devise a bit of
> >>>>hardware that would produce genuine random
> >>>>numbers?
> >>>What is a "genuine" random number?
> >>>
> >>As I understand it, a "genuine" random number is as follows:
> >>
> >>Assume you have a stream of numbers in base 10 (i.e. made up of a series
> >>of digits from 0-9).
> >>
> >>This stream of numbers would be considered random if, given the first x
> >>digits, it is impossible to determine the x+1 th digit with probability
> >>>1/10. That is to say, each digit is equally likely to be any one of
> >>the possible values.
> >>
> >>I'm sure I will be corrected if I am wrong.
> >
> > Not wrong, possibly, but not helpful in practice. If I gave you a
> >list of 100,000 numbers, could you use that definition to show that it
> >was a stream of random numbers?
> >
> I was simply trying to define what a "genuine" random number is, not how
> to test for one. I suspect that it would be possible to use this
> definition by stating that, after performing some analysis on the number
> you were able to predict the next number with probability > 1/10 a
> statistically significant number of times, the stream is probably not
> random.
>
> To declare a stream of numbers genuinely random, you would probably need
> to know more about how it was generated.
>
> Disclamer: I am only a Computer Science student, not a Mathematician
** end quote [Chris Oattes]
Do truly random numbers really exist? Isn't it simply that you choose
something that generates a sequence of numbers for which no mathematical
equation has yet been defined? ;)
--
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