A game developer proudly claims their procedurally generated worlds are “infinitely unique”… until players find the same mountain repeating on level three. A blockchain touts “provably fair” randomness… until someone exploits predictable seeds to drain $170,000. A security team deploys “military-grade encryption”… only to discover their keys were generated by a Mersenne Twister.
Here’s the brutal truth: there’s no real randomness in software. Every “random” number you generate comes from a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG)—a clever algorithm pulling numbers out of a very predictable hat. It’s like watching a magician perform card tricks: it looks random, but behind the scenes, it’s all carefully scripted.
Welcome to the paradoxical world of randomness in software, where the foundations of fair games, secure encryption, and reliable blockchains hinge on something that’s fundamentally fake. Let’s dive into why entropy management is so often a disaster and how to build systems that don’t fall apart under their predictability.
Continue reading “RNG, PRNG and Entropy: Why Your Softwares “Chaos” is Probably Broken”
Long time since my last post, I’ve been kind of busy, but here we go again.