> Could anyone that has actually understood it a bit more confirm or reject this?
In BASIC, the word "RANDOMIZE" sets the seed for the RND function, and you'll find it's initially dependant on time (including the typing speed of the user):
It then is reinitialised periodically by mixing in run time (which is highly variable due to microprocessor limitations) and checksums of previous parts of the stream:
The RAND[123] appears to be Bennett Fox's Algorithm 647, which was designed for simulation purposes (statistical randomness), and is based on Lewis-Goodman-Miller's construction from 1969, so it had a great deal of scrutiny.
I think this would have been state of the art in the late 1980s.
In BASIC, the word "RANDOMIZE" sets the seed for the RND function, and you'll find it's initially dependant on time (including the typing speed of the user):
https://github.com/Vulacode/RANDOM/blob/main/RANDOM.BAS#L295
It then is reinitialised periodically by mixing in run time (which is highly variable due to microprocessor limitations) and checksums of previous parts of the stream:
https://github.com/Vulacode/RANDOM/blob/main/RANDOM.BAS#L319
The RAND[123] appears to be Bennett Fox's Algorithm 647, which was designed for simulation purposes (statistical randomness), and is based on Lewis-Goodman-Miller's construction from 1969, so it had a great deal of scrutiny.
I think this would have been state of the art in the late 1980s.