From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!news.linkpendium.com!news.linkpendium.com!news.snarked.org!border2.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!buffer2.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!nntp.earthlink.com!news.earthlink.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2018 19:31:09 -0600 From: Dennis Lee Bieber Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Simulating the rolling of dices to produce truly random numbers? Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2018 20:31:10 -0500 Organization: IISS Elusive Unicorn Message-ID: <9oed5dpvvbfeg537ekrg08qpg99l02h8cg@4ax.com> References: <0f1048d2-187c-4578-ae7b-d209e229bfbe@googlegroups.com> User-Agent: ForteAgent/8.00.32.1272 X-No-Archive: YES MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 108.73.118.61 X-Trace: sv3-9Qqtn4pJIIv20NvtR4zbuOGo78OfvbURL0bZ8E4v66+vmzaW6+hIibqOQBPVCOWZ2acsi5A27NztiLT!IhsQH4kQMxCcztMY6j8RrruWzh6MkwebIzZUq3kb8/mvbazD5qloPwuVoNdQAmizqgeVcy0CZTzQ!g+aMgUs199rWc24qYV8Pw+d121M= X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 X-Original-Bytes: 3555 Xref: reader02.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:49864 Date: 2018-01-10T20:31:10-05:00 List-Id: On Wed, 10 Jan 2018 14:54:44 -0800 (PST), Mace Ayres declaimed the following: >On Wednesday, January 10, 2018 at 7:50:21 AM UTC-8, Mr. Man-wai Chang wrote: >> Is it possible? Any existing algorithms or published papers? > >Are we assured that our human mind/intelligence can know if a number is truly random, or if a algorithm will generate a true random number? If algorithmic, then deterministic? Is the idea of a truly random number an idea, but not necessarily a number that can be proven to be random? How random is good enough? > Pick an algorithm... Run many samples... Perform statistical analysis between expected result vs actual... Many random number generators out there -- some have reasonable randomness, some not... A generator that is using some processor clock may not provide randomness if invoked in a loop as the loop is a fixed duration and could keep reading the clock at a determined interval. Your subject says "dice" (note: "dice" IS the plural, not "dices" -- a single one is a "die"). How many dice per "roll". How many sides per die? (I bring this up as role playing games use 4-sided, 6-sided, 8-sided, 12-sided, and 20-sided [substituting for 10-sided by modulo], and some novelty dice purport to be 100-sided (percentile dice -- more commonly done by rolling 2 20-sided to provide 0-9/0-9). For a single die, random means one should have close to an even number of occurences for each value. For a 6-sided die, 6000 rolls should produce 1000 occurences of each value -- since reality won't be that pure, you have to analyze if the differences still constitute random. If rolling multiple dice at a time, the results should fit a bell-curve -- and again you should have a "truth" value for the bell curve against which to test the actual results. No test will state that something is truly random -- statistical tests rely on probability that the result may not be random... IE: is the difference between "truth" and experiment within 95% of the test parameter. >If I choose n among the set 1..500, based on my own sense of randomness, is that random? 500 samples is rather small... More samples means statistical differences will be more precise. -- Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber AF6VN wlfraed@ix.netcom.com HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/