Let's suppose that we have a six sided dice game and we are generating a random number. Generally random number generation is tied to the system clock. However what if we had the randomly generated number query a randomly sorted database with six values? At any point in time the state of the database will be unknown. It could just be an octal number stored in memory the user can't access all we would do is add and overflow whenever random is used.

Edited March 19, 20178 yr by fiveworlds

How do you make the database's order itself random?

all we would do is add and overflow whenever random is used.

 

 

That sounds like a very crude version of a pseudo random number generator.

 

 

Generally random number generation is tied to the system clock.

 

This is not true. Sometimes people are recommended to seed the RNG using he clock, but this doesn't improve randomness at all.

Surely the thing to do is use hardware random?

"At any point in time the state of the database will be unknown."

 

So is randomness inherent in the thing? Or is randomness just a description of our ignorance?

 

If you flip a coin and it lands on the ground, but you haven't looked at it yet, what are the odds it's heads? 50-50, right? Because probability does not tell us about the coin. It tells us about our state of ignorance.

Edited March 20, 20178 yr by wtf