Christmas Challenge: Day 3

[Dentafrice]

And that means anything? Like I said.. I'd like to see you enter something "creative".

This is a logic experiment for generating a RN. Creativity really doesn't play into it, logic does. Logic and true randomness.

Like I said, enter

[Chippiewill]

I don't have time to write a script but I'd probably do something like:

Generate time() and microtime(), raise time() to the power of microtime()*10^-(Length of microtime) store as $n1, repeat again but multiply microtime by it's second non-zero digit then store as $n2, repeat but multiply microtime by it's last non-zero digit store as $n3, multiply these all together to make $n4, convert all these to binary, XOR them then store as $fnum, convert $fnum back to base_10, choose central 10 digits and append them to final number, repeat 100 times. Would probably have a bias towards zero due to XOR, I'd also have to manually xor the numbers rather than use "^" as it's technically an encryption function.

[Dentafrice]

And that's creative?

[Chippiewill]

I didn't use an easy peasy encoding function to change my non-random integer into a pseudorandom one.

[Dentafrice]

You still used time and micro time, the base of mine. So in regards, they both do the same thing from the same initial seed

[Chippiewill]

That I wasn't bothered about, regardless. Considering you're the only entry you still win. Which colour VIP would you like?

[Dentafrice]

I couldn't take it from you, I've been a real butt to you. Either buy it for yourself from me, or buy it for me and me not know about it haha. Whatever color, I don't care

[HotelUser]

[@]@Dentafrice[/@]

Okay first of all as you said he's a non-programmer so maybe you should have humoured him a little bit with his rules and allowed the terminology conflict to slide, because he's trying to do something fun here and if you're only going to put him down by being cynical you're only ruining it.

Second I don't understand why you've pressured him into posting what he would have done just to tell him it's not very creative. I'm not sure how he's validating the scripts by compressing them, but from a general standpoint your script to generate a psudorandom number wasn't super creative either.

[Dentafrice]

You're not understanding that logical applications such as PRNGS, OCRs, and things of that nature are not "meant" to be creative. That is why I was making fun of him for a "creative" programming competition.

Programming is logical, not an art project.

[Chippiewill]

I'm not sure how he's validating the scripts by compressing them

Compression is often used to check how random data is because non-random data should be incompressible. This is because procedural generators eventually loop back round or have repeats which is how most compression formats work, (Locating repeats and storing the location of them instead of storing two copies of the same thing). For example if you kept appending time stamps one second apart then a majority of the time stamp would be repeated each iteration.

You're not understanding that logical applications such as PRNGS, OCRs, and things of that nature are not "meant" to be creative. That is why I was making fun of him for a "creative" programming competition.

Programming is logical, not an art project.

The purpose of the competition was to show people how difficult it is to create random data, I was hoping that people would make scripts without the use of hashing or encryption or encoding to make it challenging and then to use unique ways of generating the numbers, and then to tinker around with it until it becomes fairly incompressible.