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Philosophically, there is no such thing as a random number
by ihatepython 4y ago
Philosophically, there is no such thing as a random number
- dharmab 4y agoThere are ways to get truly random numbers into a computer. Certain phenomena are theorized to be fundamentally random, and can be used as inputs to hardware. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_gener...
- majewsky 4y agoThe sound of conviction in your first sentence does not match the "theorized to be" in the second sentence. I recommend that you don't bring a "for all intents and purposes" to a "philosophically" fight. ;)
- mseepgood 4y agoHowever, the universe is based on randomness at its quantum core.
- morepork 4y agoOr perhaps the universe is a simulation whose prng was seeded with 1 just like golang does Maybe we're in the first batch of simulations, and the tester came along and asks why they're all identical. The cosmic coder then realises that they forgot to call the function to seed the prng.
- runarberg 4y agoIs it though? I’m merely a layperson here so I might be grossly misunderstanding, but I didn’t know determinism had been ruled out by quantum physics. I was under the impression that quantum phenomena was best described using probability. That means there might be an element of true randomness going on, but also that these systems are so chaotic that an observation is going to have some noise, regardless of any randomness at the core. The latter says nothing about how random things are, merely that they appear with some probability, they could be completely deterministic for all we know.