Imagine that we're sat down in an empty, small room with nothing but a clean, white table and simple wooden chairs with walls, floors and the ceiling all painted white and I asked you to "Write down a random number between one and a million on the paper in front of you" what number would you write? Do you think that the number you wrote down is truly random and was actually chosen of your own free will? I would personally believe so, depending on the response; even if you might have been influenced slightly by exterior factors.
Why do I think this? We're both organic lifeforms, sentient and capable of making our own decisions. We exist due to at least some elements of entropy within the universe that are non-linear, making us sporadic and truly random. This is what it truly means to be alive within this universe, providing us with the glorious gift of free will.
Now imagine a slightly different scenario, this time we're going to ask a modern-day, 64-bit computer running a 64-bit operating system the same question that I asked you. What is the response? 800635 is the answer that I got this time. However, what is not actually important when we ask the computer the same question is the value of the response but more about how the computer came to this conclusion.
As many people know, computers operate entirely using binary at the lowest level to send electronic signals along their circuits. Computers operate using nothing but mathematical formulas due to their consistent design. This allows us (humans) to control precisely what parameters go in and what parameters come out of the system.
The digital world and the analogue world are two completely different places, almost as if they are their own respective, completely isolated dimensions but are somehow linked by the woven fabrics of the universe. Computers operate using an entirely digital, non-analogue system and any inputs that they receive from the analogue world must be translated into digital in order for them to be read.
In the "heat death" theory of the universe, it is believed at the universe started with low entropy and will "burn out" due to high entropy. This is due to the likeliness of atomic reactions decreasing as the vastness and momentum of spaces scale linearly based on the distance from the start of the universe. Is this truly a realistic theory? Or is it simply an explanation used to fill in the gaps of knowledge we do not yet possess.
Would digital signals have existed without human intervention? Actually, in a way yes but also no. In nature, we could state that everything is analogue however that is only from our own human perspectives. We define digital signals as being "blocky" in nature whereas we define analogue signals as "wavy" such as the literal waves of the ocean. If we consider all of these factors, it clearly depends on the perspective of the lifeform and which side of the metaphoric fence they sit on. To us, things may be "set in stone" or clearly defined, however they truly are like many things in the universe; ambiguous terms that we use to generalise and understand the things around us.
How does this relate to computers? Well, until quantum computing actually becomes a more viable and consumer-level product the idea of randomness generated by a computer is truly implausible. Mathematical formulas will forever control the standard binary world that we know and love today, restricted by nothing but our own imaginations and the limitations of modern mathematics. True, artificial randomness does not currently exist not even from a more practical perspective.
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