[OT] Plato's Pub and Philosophical Society

[Jack Simth]

Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
If an AI compares random numbers to decide whether to go left or right, is that free will? It will be chaotic and unpredictable...

As a computer programming student, I can tell you it is extremely difficult to get a computer to produce truly random numbers. It is possible, mind you - it takes hardware that produces truly random input, such as a noisy diode or a human user; sometimes a clever programmer will use the processor itself as a truly random number generator by using the clock drift - however, those are very rarely used. What is normally produced is pseudorandom numbers. These numbers come out of simple equations, where the routine goes something like this (I may have my suntax a bit off):

double Random(Double *seed){
double r = 1.73658965335795;
double d = 4.56891247479574;
*seed = r * (*seed) - d * (*seed) * (*seed)
return *seed;
}

While not truly random, these types of routines produce numbers that are scarecly predictable.