Re: Uploading -- not quite what you want it to be?

From: ABlainey@aol.com
Date: Sat Jun 29 2002 - 19:45:00 MDT


> On Thursday, June 27, 2002 4:27 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote,
>
> > One of the stronger ways of defining randomness of a string of bits is
> > that having access to all previous bits give you no information about
> > the next. This can be expressed in algorithmic information theory by
> > saying that the shortest program that can generate the first N bits of
> > the string is N bits long. If they can be generated by a shorter
> > program, they are less random. In this sense pi and e are rather
> > nonrandom numbers, while the vast majority of numbers have truly random
> > bit sequences. The problem is that proving that a number is
> > algorithmically random is not possible in general...
>

OK, so what's wrong with taking a known random source like radio noise and
using it for generating our numbers?
How about at the time of number generation, reading in every pixel from a TV
picture of snow and extrapolating a number from it? Even if you add the pixel
values and round them down to either a 0 or 1. You still have a random
source. Yeh? Nay?

K.I.S.S >as in simple like me :o)

Alex



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