Mike Williams wrote:
> Wasn't it stbenge who wrote:

>> Well, I just made a random landscape generator, and it's huge. I'm 
>> sure it repeats eventually, but I haven't seen it happen.
> 
> Well that's what you'd expect with "nearly infinite". I wouldn't expect 
> to see any repetition in a landscape the size of the Earth.

Using what as a measuring stick? 1 pixel = 1 atom?

>>> It's possible to create hardware random number generators that are 
>>> truly  random, using quantum effects, but they'd be useless for 
>>> generating  randomly generated topology because they wouldn't produce 
>>> the same  random numbers when you re-render the scene.
>>
>> I think we are still a ways off from seeing a commercial quantum 
>> computer. Is there a way to achieve quantum effects apart from the 
>> corresponding hardware?
> 
> Well you certainly can't write software that's sensitive to quantum 
> fluctuations on a deterministic digital computer, so you either need 
> some hardware that is sensitive to quantum fluctuations, or an external 
> feed of data that is generated by such hardware. Such external data 
> feeds include things like UK Premium Bond winning numbers and Lottery 
> winning numbers.
> 
> [UK Premium Bond numbers use the signal noise in transistors. Each 
> impact of the balls in a lottery machine doubles the angle of 
> reflection, so after a few hundred impacts a difference in initial 
> conditions at the quantum level would be amplified sufficiently to cause 
> a different ball to be selected.]
> 
> We're not talking "quantum computers" here. That's something completely 
> different.

We're talking about chaos theory, yes? Nothing is truly random, rather 
everything is a result of cause and effect. But try to predict it :)

Sam

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