But don’t you have to come up with a seed number … at random?
There ought to be a way to generate a seed by observing your environment … maybe adding up all the digits you can see at that moment, or counting the number of something…
Well, given how bad humans are at generating sequences of random numbers, perhaps even arbitrarily picking one seed is a lot better than arbitrarily picking 59 numbers without an algorithm. So you’re right that some human choice is required, but hopefully its impact is diminished.
maybe adding up all the digits you can see at that moment, or counting the number of something…
Counting the number of doors and windows, perhaps? Or just checking the time?
If you have a method (or multiple methods) of generating random numbers that you don’t quite trust, you can add them up modulo the base number. This will take numbers sampled from biased distributions, and produce a much more uniform distribution.
Hah, that’s clever - and as it happened earlier this week I was faced with a challenge that involved trying to come up with random numbers purely mentally.
But don’t you have to come up with a seed number … at random?
There ought to be a way to generate a seed by observing your environment … maybe adding up all the digits you can see at that moment, or counting the number of something…
Well, given how bad humans are at generating sequences of random numbers, perhaps even arbitrarily picking one seed is a lot better than arbitrarily picking 59 numbers without an algorithm. So you’re right that some human choice is required, but hopefully its impact is diminished.
Counting the number of doors and windows, perhaps? Or just checking the time?
If you have a method (or multiple methods) of generating random numbers that you don’t quite trust, you can add them up modulo the base number. This will take numbers sampled from biased distributions, and produce a much more uniform distribution.
Hah, that’s clever - and as it happened earlier this week I was faced with a challenge that involved trying to come up with random numbers purely mentally.