I was unsure where to post this so if I have come to the wrong place, feel free to ship it somewhere else.

I was talking to the girlfriend's sister's boyfriend (has an IT company so is very much a techie) last night and we got on to the subject of online poker, he asked me whether or not I thought it was rigged. I gave the usual speech. He then explained that computers cannot randomly generate numbers as they must be programmed. He raises a good point?

To what extent is this true? I mean programming gazillions of combinations of possibilities wouldnt be possible would it? How do the sites go about it? And what do I say next time I see him, I am in need of a Bill Gates worthy explanation from you!

Ps. Before the berating begins, I am not saying the pokerz is in any way rigged.

"He then explained that computers cannot randomly generate numbers as they must be programmed."

That's just nonsense. There's all kinds of ways computers can generate random numbers. Even picking the 14th digit after the decimal point of the temperature of your computer CPU is going to give you a completely random number at any instant in time. There's billions of other ways to take some fluctuating bit of data and choose an arbitrary digit to get something random that no one could predict in advance. I have no clue how poker sites do it, but google will probably tell you. I guarantee it has nothing to do with "programming gazillions of combinations of possibilities", since anyone who could access that programming info could predict what would happen.

He's not much of a techie if he doesn't understand random number generators.
I had to write a very simplistic one in Fortran around 20 years ago that used the second digits of the clock as a seed number.
That was simplistic even at the time.
True the algorithm wasn't random, but the seed number was, resulting in a random number.

Quite interesting topic! But what if they programmed to generate random numbers? lol He is right but the programmed algorithm right exactly is The Random Number Generator.

Remind me never to buy any IT product or service from that guy.

I think he is confusing randomness with deterministic.

It is also worth pointing out that the RNGs usually used by poker sites use hardware entropy generation and often user action derived entropy as well.

We're talking pseudorandom here, it means that we generate a sequence of numbers that matches the properties of "true" random numbers based on seed. And seed can never be "true" random. Doesn't mean poker is rigged tho...

15 years ago concerns about rng's were legit. The flaws are fixed since then though.
http://www.cigital.com/papers/downlo...r_gambling.php

year back they used repeating sequences for some things. but not anymore.
even if it isnt truly random it is close enough for accuracy