On Sat, Jun 28, 2014 at 4:28 PM, Kai Krakow <hurikha...@gmail.com> wrote: [ ... ] > I cannot follow your reasoning here - but I'd like to learn. Actually, I ran > this multiple times and never saw long sets of the same character, even no > short sets of the same character. The 0 or 1 is always rolled over into the > next random addition.
That doesn't matter. Take a non-negative integer N; if you flip a coin an infinite number of times, then the probability of the coin landing on the same face N times in a row is 1. This means that it is *guaranteed* to happen, and it *will* happen for any N you want: 1,000,000, a thousand billions, a gazillion. That is a mathematical fact. This of course is a consequence of "infinite" being really really large, but it means that technically you cannot rule a RNG as broken only because you saw that it produced the same result N times, which is the crux of the Dilbert joke. In practice, of course, it's a big sign that something is wrong. But there is a non-zero probability that it's actually correct. Because with randomness, you can never be sure. Regards. -- Canek Peláez Valdés Profesor de asignatura, Facultad de Ciencias Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
