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randomness: n. 1. An inexplicable misfeature; gratuitous inelegance. 2. A hack or crock
that depends on a complex combination of coincidences (or, possibly, the
combination upon which the crock depends for its accidental failure to
malfunction). “This hack can output characters 40--57 by putting the
character in the four-bit accumulator field of an XCT and then extracting
six bits — the low 2 bits of the XCT opcode are the right
thing.” “What randomness!” 3. Of people, synonymous with flakiness. The connotation is that the person
so described is behaving weirdly, incompetently, or inappropriately for
reasons which are (a) too tiresome to bother inquiring into, (b) are
probably as inscrutable as quantum phenomena anyway, and (c) are likely to
pass with time. “Maybe he has a real complaint, or maybe it's just
randomness. See if he calls back.” Despite the negative connotations of most jargon uses of this term
have, it is worth noting that randomness can actually be a valuable
resource, very useful for applications in cryptography and elsewhere.
Computers are so thoroughly deterministic that they have a hard time
generating high-quality randomness, so hackers have sometimes felt the need
to built special-purpose contraptions for this purpose alone. One
well-known website offers random bits generated by radioactive
decay. Another derives random bits from chaotic systems in analog electronics.
Originally, the latter site got its random bits by doing photometry on lava
lamps. Hackers invariably found this hilarious. If you have to ask why,
you'll never get it.)
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