On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 07:20:45AM -0500, Roger Clough wrote: > Hi Russell Standish > > According to a web page, havege is probably the > best random number generator known, but it still > is not a "true" random number gen. There must be
They are probably being modest. What they have is as close to a true random number generator as is physically possible. It beats radioactive decay and lava lamps by several orders of magnitude. > ways of testing for true randomness statistically. There are, but all of them are only partial tests. Just as it is impossible (short of exhaustive enumeration) to know if one has the shortest program giving a particular sequence, it is impossible to know for certain if a given sequence is truly random (wrt a reference TM), as that requires knowing there is no program shorter than the length of the sequence iteself generating that sequence. > But that doesn't really bother me if we are only talking > about apparent randomness. > HAVEGE is as random as the real world. Sure, it is possible that the real world is utterly deterministic, but then QM is not a true description of reality. > Anyway, I looked up your "theory of nothing" > book on wikipedia and find it very interesting. Wikipedia only has passing references to it, mainly from the Library of Babel article. You probably landed on my website :). -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
