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Ask HN: You're in an empty room. How do you generate a random number?

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Re: Ask HN: You're in an empty room. How do you generate a random number?

#21

Post by lukesed »

botbooty wrote: post #18
moocow01 wrote: post #10

Take off your undergarment throw it by one wall. Assuming the room has 4 walls this is your marker for wall "0". The rest of the walls going counter-clockwise will be walls "1", "2" and "3". Close your eyes and spin in the room until you lose your orientation then stop and open your eyes. Record the number of the wall you are facing in your head. Repeat spin and remember next new number. Repeat spin and remember next…

This assumes that the number of times one can rotate before losing one's orientation is random. Presumably it is not only regular, but you might even get better as you practiced. Both of these would conspire to produce substantial autocorrelation in the generated series.

Number of rotations will probably be clustered. (degrees rotated mod 360)/4, not so much.

Re: Ask HN: You're in an empty room. How do you generate a random number?

#25

Post by NatW »

Easy. The question is ambiguous and everyone else here isn't being particularly creative, yet.

Is the empty room inside e.g: a space station or a rocket? Am I a robot or an alien? Does the undergarment contain any wearable electronics with an antenna?

So let's say I'm an alien with an ability to detect the state of my antenna in my undergarment. I'll just occasionally check the level of a very high frequency electromagnetic wave in the antenna and occasionally write down the last significant digit of the output. no problem. ;)

Re: Ask HN: You're in an empty room. How do you generate a random number?

#26

Post by muntoo »

gadders wrote: post #12

Remove clothes. Begin urinating whilst dancing to Born this Way by Lady Gaga (music in your head). At completion of flow, see which number the splatters on the floor most resemble.

What about people who spin in circles and think everything looks like a 0? It isn't completely random if someone is biased towards a number, especially when the picture is uncertain. A possibly better approach would be to count the number of 'splatters' (or whatever), and mod by some smaller number (i.e., 16).

Re: Ask HN: You're in an empty room. How do you generate a random number?

#27

Post by muntoo »

str1ng3r wrote: post #24

I can't believe nobody has noticed that there's no light in this room. How the hell are you going to see where the walls are, or where your undergarment is falling if you throw it through the air?

One can't be sure if there is air, gravity (or how much), or a singularity sitting right outside the room. We don't know if it is filled with solely oxygen at 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000psi.
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