For example, how does an infinitely randomized world like Minecraft manage to generate me an identical world to my friend with just a handful of numbers that they send me?
In: Technology
Most random number generators on a computer aren’t really random. Instead, they generate a sequence of numbers that *looks* random, by picking a starting value and doing math to it. That starting value is the seed.
Usually, you want your random numbers to be different every time, so you use a value that changes naturally as the seed, like the current time. When you want to generate the same sequence of ‘random’ numbers, you can provide the random number generator with a seed. The math starts in the same place, so it generates the same series of numbers.
Then, when Minecraft generates a world, all it has to do is make sure it does the random world generation steps in the same order every time: that way, the same sequence of random numbers turns into the same world output.
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