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[nekoexmachina]

Half-life is constant, so literally the opposite of random.

Not what I meant, really. Sorry for bad english skills
Is the direction where particles fly during half-life? Etc.
The point is, you could have a good RNG algorithm based on IRL thing. That would be darn slow & unproductive, however.

[blazing glory]

There are more possible DF worlds than the estimated number of planets in the universe. Also it should be noted that its is completely impossible for a computer to generate anything truly randomly. Most often it has been proven in human experience that those things we once presumed were random were in fact just too complex for us to predict using the methods we had at the time.

What caused you to hunt this thread out from the deep reccess's of the General Discussion forum and bring it from the dead?

[Draco18s]

Half-life is constant, so literally the opposite of random.

That's...really an over-simplification...

[Putnam]

Half-life is constant, so literally the opposite of random.

That's...really an over-simplification...

The point is it ain't random, as it can be very easily be predicted using a constant.

Half-life is constant, so literally the opposite of random.

Not what I meant, really. Sorry for bad english skills
Is the direction where particles fly during half-life? Etc.
The point is, you could have a good RNG algorithm based on IRL thing. That would be darn slow & unproductive, however.

Oh, direction of emission during radioactive decay. Yeah, that's sufficiently random for many things, but it might not be truly random.

[Draco18s]

The point is it ain't random, as it can be very easily be predicted using a constant.

...actually it is.

Probabilistic nature of half-life
A half-life usually describes the decay of discrete entities, such as radioactive atoms. In that case, it does not work to use the definition "half-life is the time required for exactly half of the entities to decay". For example, if there are 3 radioactive atoms with a half-life of one second, there will not be "1.5 atoms" left after one second.

Instead, the half-life is defined in terms of probability: "Half-life is the time required for exactly half of the entities to decay on average". In other words, the probability of a radioactive atom decaying within its half-life is 50%.

[Putnam]

I'm saying that it's a not-sufficiently-chaotic function where results can be ballpark predicted if given the seed easily. Increasing the input by the half-life will approximately halve the output, while in a "good" random function outputs don't map to inputs in a very clear way.

The time between emissions may be a good source of randomness, though.

[Draco18s]

Hence "over simplification."