Humans are notoriously bad at coming up with random numbers. I wanted to be able to quickly generate “random enough” numbers. I’m not looking for anything that great, I just want to be able to come up with the random digits in half a minute. Some looking around brought me to an old usenet post by George Marsaglia: Choose a 2-digit number, say 23, your “seed”.
Form a new 2-digit number: the 10’s digit plus 6 times the units digit.
When I began programming, I read a copy of Richard Steven’s “Programming in the UNIX Environment.” Ultimately, my early experimentations with C were a failur.
When Quinn Wilton stumbled across Roblox, the user-generated cross between
Minecraft and a social network, in 2006 at the age of 12 or 13, she was seeking a way to create games she couldnât find elsewhere. Roblox, which describes itself as a platform for people to produce immersive experiences, was then in its infancy. Today, it â and Wilton â have changed somewhat: Roblox is now a £27 billion phenomenon, recently listed on the stock market, that you likely havenât even heard of; Wilton, now 28, is a cybersecurity technician, putting the programming skills she learned in her teenage years into practice. Sheâs one of many in the Roblox generation who have learned important life skills from their time in the Roblox world and is an indication of where todayâs children weaned on Roblox are likely to end up.