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13. October 2012, 05:46:42
playBunny 
Subject: Re: Lots o' fives
Aganju: Part of my masters degree was about 'Pseudo random numbers', how to make them and how to analyze the quality. It's been a while, though.

It must have been a few decades ago if they were using the time as a seed for each random number.

Except that even then the time wasn't used to obtain each random number because you don't seed for each random number, you seed the generator once, when you first start using it.

Aganju: the routine uses the current time as seed or so. If you make many moves within a minute, all your opponents get the same roll.

So that's balderdash and gives me every reason to doubt that you studied random number generators in any depth, if at all. Generated numbers have got nothing to do with the time and everything to do with the position in the sequence which, of course, changes every time you pluck a number out. That's even assuming that a mathematical random number generator is being used in the first place, which isn't necessarily the case.

Furthermore, if some junior programmer did make the mistake of reseeding the generator before every number, they'd have to be an idiot to take the computer time - accurate to milliseconds, if not microseconds or nanoseconds, and throw most of it away just to use the minute!

Fencer, by the way, isn't even remotely a junior programmer, nor is he an idiot, although pgt's observation is, unfortunately, correct.

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