> why is it so hard to get a cryptographically secure random number? Because computers are pure unadulterated determinism
Then you've missed the part of software.
Software isn't computer science, it's not always about code. It's about solving problems in a way we can control and manufacture.
If we needed random numbers, we could easily use a hardware that uses some physics property, or we could pull in an observation from an api like the weather. We don't do these things because pseudo-random is good enough, and other solutions have drawbacks (like requiring an internet for api calls). But that doesn't mean software can't solve these problems.
It's not about the random numbers it's about the tree of possibilities having to be defined up front (in software or hardware). That all inputs should be defined and mapped to some output and that this process is predictable and reproducible.
This makes computers incredibly good at what people are not good at -- predictably doing math correctly, following a procedure, etc.
But because all of the possibilities of the computer had to be written up as circuitry or software beforehand, it's variability of outputs is constrained to what we put into it in the first place (whether that's a seed for randomness or model weights).
You can get random numbers and feed it into the computer but we call that "fuzzing" which is a search for crashes indicating unhandled input cases and possible bugs or security issues.
No, you're missing what they said. True randomness can be delivered to a computer via a peripheral - an integrated circuit or some such device that can deliver true randomness is not that difficult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generat...
Maybe I'm misreading it but I think the OP understands that.
If you feed that true randomness into a computer, what use is it? Will it impair the computer at the very tasks in which it excels?
> That all inputs should be defined and mapped to some output and that this process is predictable and reproducible.
Chemical reactions are "predictable and reproducible", as well as quantum interactions, so does that make you a computer?
This comment thread is dull. I'm bailing out.