>>13131228It’s not periodicity necessarily. It’s about predictability. A psuedoramdom number generate takes some number (the seed) performs a complicated and hard to reverse-engineer operation on that seed, and in doing so produces a number, and then repeats that process over and over, giving (if the operation is well-constructed), a sequence of outputs which is sort of random, in the sense that it satisfies some properties associated with randomness (e.g. no correlation between sequential numbers, even distribution over the range of outputs, etc). But if you knew the seed and the operation, you could predict each and every output with absolute certainty. The sequence is ACTUALLY deterministic. It just ‘looks’ random in a particular sense. A truly random sequence couldn’t be predicted no matter how much information you had. Such sequences will generally rely on quantum mechanical processes if they’re really thorough, or minute weather patterns if they’re slightly less thorough. You can look up what properties a psuedorandom sequence seeks to emulate. I’m sure it’d be interested
