-> DW> make the RNDs *less* like real random numbers!
-> You can't more or less random numbers on a computer they are never
-> random its just  a long  and complicated  series which the randomize
-> timer tells it what term to start at.
As I said, the RNDs are *like* random numbers. Yes, it's true, they're
not truly random. If you generate enough of them (billions, I believe),
the cycle will go back to the start, and you'll get the exact same
sequence of numbers you got earlier.
However, any reasonably short chunk of RNDs behaves remarkably like
truly random numbers behave. It satisfies just about every empirical
test for randomness. For example, if you take a formula such as:
PRINT 1 + INT(6 * RND)
which generates an integer between 1 and 6 (useful for simulating
tossing dice, for instance), the six possible outcomes will occur pretty
well exactly as would happen if you tossed a real die many times. The
six numbers would come up equally often, in the long run, there would be
no tendency for 4s to follow 1s, or whatever, more often than chance
would predict, and so on and so on. In fact, the *only* way you can tell
that the RND generator is not truly random, in a reasonably short period
of time, is to seed it with the same number twice, and observe that it
then generates the same sequence of numbers both times. Truly random
numbers wouldn't do that.
A lot of disparaging things are often written about using RNDs because
they're not "really" random. Actually, few things ever are. If you take
a deck of cards, cut it into two roughly equal parts, then riffle them
together as someone does when shuffling them, the card that was on the
top of the deck will almost certainly be in the top few cards after the
first cut and riffle. Repeating the process many times, as is done when
cards are really shuffled, makes the predictability far less, but it can
never make the order of the cards really random. And yet everyone who
plays cards assumes that their order, after shuffling, is random.
For pretty well all practical purposes, the RNDs that computers generate
are just fine.
                             dow
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