#978 Alone in the Dark(Note: I got a male named Silvio for the main character.)
The Issue
Convicted criminal and former journalist @@RANDOMNAME_1@@ was recently released from @@CAPITAL@@ Central Penitentiary. @@HE/SHE_1@@ is now revealing to the media the horrors that @@HE/SHE_1@@ suffered behind bars, specifically the "torture and terror" of solitary confinement.
The Debate
1. "Solitary confinement is demoralizing, dehumanizing, and wrong," explains @@RANDOMLASTNAME_1@@, letting wind and rain soak your desk paperwork as @@HE/SHE_1@@ throws your office window wide open. "Research has proven that it causes immense levels of lasting psychological trauma! It's also much more expensive for the prison system, and is little more than state-sanctioned torture. The inhumanity of prisoners left alone in the dark must end! Ban it now!"
2. "We only put the troublemaker in the sin bin because @@HE/SHE_1@@ kept causing problems," remarks Warden @@RANDOMNAME@@, shoving the former convict into your broom cupboard and wedging the door shut with a chair. "While solitary is used punitively to maintain prison discipline, it can also be deployed to protect the safety of the confined inmate or of other prisoners. Besides, all these ding-dongs gave up their rights the moment they turned to crime."
3. "All these prisoners are just sitting around soaking up government money; why not make them give back to society?" asks @@RANDOMNAME@@, local mad scientist. "We'll take a kidney, or maybe a cornea or two, and send them on their way. It'll be fantastic! They don't have to sit around all day wasting our money, and they get to go on doing whatever it is that they do. Think of all the lives we can save!"
Issue by Zhokinland
Edited by Candlewhisper Archive
Standard computer random number generators aren't fully random because they rely on consistent formulas, though there are ones that are good enough to be indistinguishable from true randomness for practical purposes (the trick is to calculate way more data than you actually use for each random number, and only report a small portion of it - so even if you know that small portion, you can't predict the next random number without knowing the hidden stuff).Jutsa wrote:I somewhat recently watched a game theorists video (sorry but it was actually a good one sent by a friend)
that mentioned that randomness really isn't possible with computers so they instead have to simulate it.
(course it was also hypothesized that irl randomness in of itself works in a similar way)
However, there are techniques for introducing true, non-algorithmic randomness into computers, generally by tracking stuff like nanosecond delays in the computer's hardware and incorporating them into your calculations. Most computer games tend not to use these, however (and their availability is operating-system-dependent).