DancingBear@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
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 2 weeks ago
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 weeks 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
DancingBear@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
That’s like the sunsets 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 2 weeks 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.