Exploring randomness

Now one strange thing to keep in mind is that there is no such thing as a completely random system, especially in gaming and computing. You can get close with some really complex mathematical systems but nothing is truly random. The best we can do is make it random enough to fool the player, making them believe it is random.

The reason for this is simple: computers are not random and don't think in random terms. When they generate a random number, they are using a seed (a unique number to base their random generation on) to work out what number to give you. But every time you generate a number based on that same seed, it will always be the same sequence; this is known as pseudo-random.

Most basic systems try to balance this out by also randomly generating the seed number, but this again falls under the same pattern. However, it does make the random pattern a little more random. A lot of systems use the date or current clock tick as the seed. It's important to know and...