Randomness

Randomness is useful for improving the 'quality' of applications in many different ways.

We often would like the behavior of a program to change or be unpredictable - to not be exactly the same every time we run it.

In other cases, randomness helps eliminate unwanted artifacts, such as obvious, excessively regular or repeated patterns. These include patterns in the appearance and in the movement of objects.

Things that can be randomized include:

• Positions, orientations, & sizes of objects
• Numbers of objects
• Motion - speed and direction
• Forces applied to moving objects
• Timing - when, or how frequently, something happens
• Colors
• Volumes of sounds
• Sound effects - choosing one of several, similar sounds

next