Adam Gordon Bell
Software developer who hosts CoRecursive, a podcast where each episode someone shares the story behind a piece of software being built.
“Randomness is not a property of the number, right? It's a property of the person trying to guess it.”
CoRecursive: Coding Stories · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026
Context
After testing Tetris, Doom, pi, Python's generator and the OS random source against his randomness detector, Adam draws the episode's lesson: randomness lives with the observer, not in the value.
Transcript
…from U random on my computer, it's less clear to say where it's from. They have more legitimacy. They can stamp on it like it came from a radio wave. But that doesn't mean it's more random because I think there's no observer that we're aware of that could predict ours but couldn't predict theirs.
Oh, I see. Until you find that person.
When you find that person and they're like, no, there's a vulnerability on the Mac and actually it's not truly random and whatever, then there's a difference. But right now, there's no measured difference that anyone could find, right? Yeah, which is why randomness is not a property of the number, right? It's a property of the person trying to guess it. Yeah, that's why this person, Dylan, on Hacker News, I think they sum it up well.
There is actually no such thing as a random or not random number. There are only random and not random generators.
But the all cops guy at the beginning and the blackjack poster and the guy who is angry about XCOM and even Von Neumann, right? They're all kind of getting at the same idea. Randomness is a process.
Yeah, the property of randomness isn't inherent in the value. It's derived from the observers of the value. Yeah. So if, you know, you can't predict whether you're going to hit or miss a shot in XCOM, it's random enough.