Re:Why is quality of pseudorandom number generators important?
by Udo on Thursday February 06, 2014 @07:01AM
(#7189900)
If you knew how many times I launched into that randomness vs uniformity lecture myself ;)
My point was that it's not possible to convince certain people with logic. They see random numbers and something happens to their brains, maybe it's religion. They'll always see oracles or at the very least shady manipulators behind random data.
Your players are thinking: "Dice rolls are equiprobable, so I should roll evenly-distributed results." That only starts being true after a great number of rolls.
Random distributions will be uneven and present clumps, strands and voids. For the same reason, during WWII, British intelligence thought that the Germans were bombing specific targets in London, while they were just dropping bombs at random.
Source recently posted on HN: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/12/what-does-randomne...