tebop opened this issue on Sep 26, 2008 · 21 posts
ockham posted Mon, 29 September 2008 at 1:40 PM
The trouble is that no strictly mathematical process is known to be purely random.
In other words, nothing that a computer could be programmed to do -- without some
input from a real physical process -- is guaranteed random.
Some easy-to-calculate sequences do appear to be random as far as we
have taken them. The digits of Pi would be an example. But I don't think
there's any firm proof that the sequence won't start repeating at some point.