Comment on World's smallest particle accelerator is 54 million times smaller than the Large Hadron Collider, and it works

• KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  And a pool is clean for all intents and purposes. There is still a distinction though. The fact that it is deterministic inherently makes it less random than true randomness.

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  • FooBarrington@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The input is not deterministic.

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    • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      If you take the original values used to determine the final “random number” and run them through the same sequence of calculations, you will always reach the same value.

      We rely on the fact that the inputs are so numerous and/or difficult to replicate to deem the final value “random”. But that doesn’t mean that the value cannot be reached by a second party given perfect knowledge of the original state of all inputs.

      True randomness, on the other hand, is impossible to calculate even with that perfect knowledge, because we aren’t relying on the state of inputs running through a calculation.

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      • FooBarrington@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        But that’s my point: just because you apply deterministic steps to a truly random input doesn’t make the output not truly random. You use real entropy as your starting point, which is literally exactly what you call “true randomness”. This means the output has the same level of “true randomness” as your “truly random” input, because you mathematically don’t lose entropy along the way.

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