Is the “Answer a Question” scroll box truly random?
I believe it may well be, as the box seems to employ Ajax to source its contents – it would almost be too much hassle to code an algorithm to pick questions in a particular order, as opposed to just using any server-side language’s built-in ‘random’ function to truly randomly pick questions from the database (I expect that the code just takes all of the question entries’ ID numbers in the database and picks at random any number between the first and last entries). Of course, whether a computer can ever truly perform a random task is another matter for debate, because they can’t ‘think’ randomly per se, it all has to be coded, so any program is only as random as its creator designs it to be. However, for the purposes of a Q&A web site, PHP’s rand() function is more than adequately random for anything they’d ever need – you’d have to be interested in something like life sciences or quantum physics to REALLY need something which can be shown to be absolutely random and never based on pred
