Mental Exercise

[gstopp at fibermux.com]

     Good example. Subjective randomness is very easy to achieve with 
     machines, especially in a musical context. However I suspect that the 
     original poster's intention was to take an anti-Hofstadter stance, in 
     which case it was more of a statement of religion than engineering.
     
     If you want to extend the definition of "machine" beyond computing 
     devices, then you can get what is for all practical purposes a truly 
     random function out of a back-biased PN junction. Kind of like the 
     brain of an existentialism human, stripped of everything but the 
     randomness, in a little 3-terminal package.
     
     - Gene


______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: Mental Exercise
Author:  don at till.com at ccrelayout
Date:    3/13/97 11:09 PM

   FlavorMaus at aol.com wrote:
   > sorry, a machine is incapable of true randomness.
     
While it's impossible for a simple isolated "state machine" to be 
truly random, there are bazillions of ways real-live computer-like 
machines can be completely random.
     
The recent synth-diy mail delivery problems should suggest a few! :-)