Randomness is a strange concept . We do not really know what true randomness is . We call something random when we see no apparent pattern in a sequence . For example , we can see that the sequence 1,2,3,4,5 is not random because we see a pattern . We can easily speculate how the sequence would continue . The sequence 10,100,1000,10000 also has a recognizable pattern . On the other hand , the sequence 93.2,75,49,36 has no apparent pattern and therefore , we cannot predict the next number in the sequence , then we consider that sequence random . In other words , randomness is the absence of order .
The lack of order , however , does not guarantee that something is random . A sequence is noly random if there is no way it can be reproduced given any circumstances or information ( e.g., the value of Pi appears random but there is a specific method used to reproduce those digits ).
It is difficult to actually determine if a sequence is truly random ; therefore we look at several properties of a sequence to determine its randomness :
- Even Distribution An equal probability of distribution over the entire set of data .
- Unpredictability Any one piece of data has no relationship to any previous data and provides no information about the data to follow.
- Uniqueness It would be extremely rare to randomly produce the same sequence of data more than once . The longer the sequence , the more unique it becomes .
These three properties deem random data impossible to guess , therefore making randomness a vital element for strong passwords .
Unfortunately , completely random passwords are very difficult to remember and even if we could remember them , creating them would be a complicated task .
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