Once upon a time, way back before Windows, I wrote a silly little Basic
program that was a worm crawling around on the computer screen. It used
random number generators to locate the worm, and to control the motion of
the worm.
Turned out to be a fantastic program for demonstrating how orderly the
random numbers a computer generates are. The digits might differ, but the
pattern of number generation always stayed the same for a given computer.
As a simple example, the worm might start anywhere, but would invariably
curve to the right on a particular computer. Or perhaps go forward, and
then reverse itself on another. Whatever the pattern was, it would
invariably be repeated. Eventually the noise would increase until the
deviation was sufficient that the path was substantially different, but it
would take a number of iterations before that would show up.
I spent quite a bit of time twiddling with that program trying to get it to
truly randomize the number selection, but I never succeeded.
Been a long time since I thought of that old worm program and what it showed
me about how non-random and orderly computers generate random numbers.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug Braun" <doug@dougbraun.com>
To: "David Scheidt" <dmscheidt@gmail.com>; "Shop-Talk List"
<shop-talk@autox.team.net>
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2007 12:38 AM
Subject: Re: [Shop-talk] Re laser range finder
> BTW, here is another pre-internet math/engineering
> classic I would buy in an instant if the price were
> right:
>
> http://www.wps.com/projects/million/index.html
>
> Doug
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