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Pi: Less Random Than We Thought
Autoversicherung writes "Physicists including Purdue's Ephraim Fischbach have completed a study comparing the 'randomness' in pi to that produced by 30 software random-number generators and one chaos-generating physical machine. After conducting several tests, they have found that while sequences of digits from pi are indeed an acceptable source of randomness -- often an important factor in data encryption and in solving certain physics problems -- pi's digit string does not always produce randomness as effectively as manufactured generators do."
That's only because they forgot to randomize first!
OMG!!! You mean Pi knows my SSN??? It must be a terrorist! We have to do something! (Maybe it knows where WMDs are, too)
Not only that, but the five trillionth, forty trillionth, and the quadrillionth bits of Pi are all zero... I did all that work, and it all came to naught.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I had a teacher who insisted that Pi is exactly 3.14, and that the radiation after nuclear explosion decays by a factor of 2 in exactly 5 hours.
Admittedly, he wasn't a math teacher though...
Even quantum physics, although theoretically 'random', is generally predictable and reliably recreatable for a large T distribution over time.
If you want truly unpredictable, unrecreatable, random numbers - let my wife balance your checkbook.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Calculate it in base pi. After one digit, you'll get an infinite sequence of zeroes.
10.000000......
Accounting Troll: "Over here we have our random number generator"
Number Generator Troll: "Nine Nine Nine Nine Nine Nine"
Dilbert: "Are you sure that's random?"
Accounting Troll: "That's the problem with randomness: you can never be sure"
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
Problem solved, next problem. ... Here's to Al-Kashi, a sane man and a pragmatic!
Lazy bastard.