(January 8, 2015 at 12:12 pm)JesusHChrist Wrote: From my programming days, I remember true randomness being difficult to come by. The random number generator calls would create a sequence of numbers random to themselves, but given a certain "seed" the sequence would repeat. It was pseudo-randomness.
I suppose you could extract randomness from white noise. Even then, if you used the same white noise sample, the sequence would repeat. Maybe there are more sophisticated approaches than when I was coding.
I don't think lotto systems use computers. I know California's doesn't; they use three different ballsets and three different selector machines, which are themselves chosen by a random number generated from a program. That is the closest a computer gets to selecting a number so far as I can see.
