“Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin,” former Princeton mathematics professor John von Neumann once said.
That means you, Undergraduate Housing Office.
Undergraduate room draw is based on a list ...(back to the article)
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Wow, and here I thought the Prince couldn't get any lamer. "Technocrat" sounds more like a name for a disk jokey than an Ivy League reporter.
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Two disclaimers: I have a shitty draw time and I'm a woody woo major (and thus learned everything I know about random number generators from this article). She's not complaining (at least I don't think so) and it's not like she accuses room draw of not being random. God, I wish we could pay for better draw times though. Or at least get naked for them.
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What was the point of this?
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Seriously? Is this what we complain about? Pseudorandom number generators? Two disclaimers: I have a good draw time, and I'm a CS major (and thus have a some faith in computerized number generators). But still, technology has advanced a LOT since the Vietnam War days, and number generators used in computers today tend to be remarkably random. For all practical purposes, the results of a computerized random number generator mimic true randomness very, very well. It's certainly very unlikely that if the Housing Office is using technology less than a decade old that you'll see anything like the discrepancies that happened in Vietnam. To complain about the minute final difference between true randomness and psuedorandom number generators... that strikes me as ludicrous. It's the equivalent of writing a long piece on how an obscure French grammar rule isn't observed and how this threatens the way we speak in America.
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I sense some lack of randomness in these examples too. August 15, 1989, hmm, methinks that's someone's birthday...
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Her draw time is actually fine. But after this article, we'll have to wait and see what happens next year...
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Aww, poor Josephine got a bad draw time. How sad.
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This doesn't seem like a major issue.
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