Serious question. I cannot fathom something happening without a cause. God? Random is God? Doesn't make sense. At all.
Random is God?
How would you define "true randomness"?
Connect a Geiger counter to something that's radioactive. That's your practically endless source of a truly random signal.
"True randomness"
This is a meaningless phrase. What are you trying to say? For all intends and purposes, an honest dice roll is quite random.
I cannot fathom something happening without a cause.
I don't see the connection between this and randomness. Random events also have causes, but there is some property that is difficult to predict from their cause. It's hard to predict how a dice will roll. Heisenberg's uncertainty states that there is a fundamental limit to how accurately you can know the properties of quanta, so we can reason that fundamentally, there is a lot of randomness inherent to matter, as this limit prevents us from making completely accurate predictions and therefore at some level there is unpredictability inherent in the system.
int randomNumber() {
return 4; // Chosen by fair dice roll. Guaranteed to be random.
}Disgusting, control yourself
>>6
Formally speaking it's not very proper to call a number random. How can a number in isolation be random if randomness is the property of unpredictability? Logically, we should only consider randomness to be the property of a sequence of numbers.
A sequence of numbers constructed from that function is simply a constant 4, so it's not very random, unfortunately.
>>1 nice bait
Suppose two arguments are equally convincing and there aren't any more evidence. Each argument is for the world to become a certain way. So, the universe flips a coin...
>>10
how can the universe "flips a coin" if it has no hands?
>>11
#!/bin/bash
FLIP=$(($(($RANDOM%10))%2))
if [ $FLIP -eq 1 ];then
echo "heads"
else
echo "tails"
fi
God does not play dice.
>>12
Why do you calculate `$RANDOM % 10` first?
Another idea would be
tr -cd '01' < /dev/urandom | head -c 1>>13
Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded.
tr -cdBash commands you wanted to know 20 years ago.
It's not a bash builtin, it's part of coreutils.
something happening without a cause
this implies there's a cyclic or infinitely long preceding sequence of causes
Proverbs 16:33
New King James Version
33
The lot is cast into the lap,
But its every decision is from the Lord.
Cleromancy will have you riding your bicycle to the moon.
YESSSIRRRRRR AMEN.
Chaos (entropy) is your cause
Theoretically, if you knew the exact conditions at some point in the early universe you could recreate everything that happens later.
However, as best as we can see, there is some level of true quantum randomness that'll chaos theory out into totally different outcomes later.
So for true randomness, you must first invent the universe
True randomness does exist, it comes from Katy, t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m.