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Comment by ooopdddddd

8 hours ago

There are several very practical reasons (and not emotional) reasons to expect that "4" is the result of bad implementation.

I can think any number of programming mistakes that will result in a supposed (pseudo-)random number generator to be be biased to very small numbers. I have made such mistakes myself.

By any reasonable estimate, the probability of randomly picking a number below 256 is MUCH smaller than the probability of someone having made a mistake.

3 comments

ooopdddddd

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palata  6 hours ago

So you say that programming mistakes make small numbers more likely to be picked, and therefore seeing a small number is less likely than seeing a bigger number?

That doesn't make sense, does it?

  • echoangle  3 hours ago

    The claim is “if I generate a random number with equal distribution in a gigantic range and get a very tiny number, it’s more likely that there’s a mistake somewhere than that I just got this number randomly”.