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this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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Is that even possible? I know that computers are not able to make true randomness, and that people are even worse at it. There's that lava lamp wall that somebody uses, maybe?
Computers are able to "make true randomness" if you give them the appropriate sensors and hardware, leveraging physical phenomena. Regardless, OP specified the following:
The lava lamps are not true random though. For something to be truly random, it must be non-deterministic (no seed at all). The only way for a computer to accomplish this is to read from a source of true randomness in nature. The lava lamps are random enough, but not truly random.
At the moment, the only source thought of being non-deterministic is quantum mechanics.
So if you make a computer generate random numbers out of the randomness of quantum mechanics, you would have truly random numbers.
And even then, if you look at quantum mechanics through the right lens, its apparent randomness is only an illusion of perspective. If you flip the quantum coin, then with 100% certainty, perfectly deterministically, it will come up heads in one timeline and tails in the other. It's only because your two future selves can't interact with each other that they can't have an argument about what the result "really" was, so one says, "it actually came up heads, and the result was completely random," and the other says, "it actually came up tails, and the result was completely random."