Thanks to my colleague Brendan Jennings I’m now spending an unhealthy amount of time considering whether a random number generator would have to be tested over an enumerably or unenumerably infinite period of time to be proven truly random. When you leave behind the notion of statistically useful levels of randomness, <b>”random”</b> becomes an ideal. Random? is one of the biggest questions imaginable, predicated on a perhaps-impossible absolute comprehension of relativity, quantum effects, determinism, free-will, the origins of life and the universe itself.
I’ll never take
java.util.Random generator = new java.util.Random();
for granted again.