I mean if it’s generated by some piece of code that would imply it follows some methodology or algorithm to come up with something. How could that be random? Random is that which is unpredictable.
In: Mathematics
In a deterministic universe, nothing is unpredictable, but some events are damn too complicated to be, in practice, predicted.
There is noting essentially unpredictable when you toss a coin, or roll a dice.
A random generator outputs a seemingly random, but essentially fixed, stream of numbers. The catch is, you can start in this stream from wherever you want. this starting point is called ‘the seed’
If you calculate this seed by mixing together the current temperature of the cpu, the content of a couple memory cells, the amount of vertical pixels movements of your mouse for the last 5 minutes, the sum of the values of every third byte that passed through you network interface, multiplied by the value of every forth byte read by your disk interface, you end up with a pretty impossible to guess seed, hence a pretty random stream of numbers spat out of you random generator.
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