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Terry Davis' crazy is actually pretty easy to understand. He believes that God exists. However, the word of god is a random sentence generator he created (though he would say god willed him to do it). This means he is following the will of an RNG. If he's not trolling (look how long Andy Kauffman would hold a gag), I don't find his zealotry for his version of God much different than other religious zealotry. At least, his schitzophrenia is functional, and it's very interesting to watch software development dictated by an RNG.

There seems to be a correllation between the DSM-IV classification of Aspergers and a predilection to views outside social norms.

if you can get past the blatant and often blinding racism he'd spew on HN, Davis actually had some really interesting insights in his posts. Shame they were all greyed-out.




I looked at the RNG in TempleOS out of curiosity. I assumed he was mixing in some noise sources that could be explained as some kind of universal communication subchannel from god. Here's the relevant code (in HolyC of course):

  I32 RandI32()
  {//Random I32. Xor with TimsStamp.
    sys_rnd_seed.i32[0]=(1664525*sys_rnd_seed.i32[0]+1013904223)^GetTSC>>4;
    return sys_rnd_seed.i32[0];
  }
There are very similar RNG functions for signed and unsigned versions of 16, 32 and 64 bit ints. The GetTSC function just calls RDTSC, combines the two 32-bit halves in EAX and EDX and returns the recombined 64-bit TSC.

So the last returned value is used as part of the seed for the next one. The initial seed is set in kend.cpp:

  sys_rnd_seed  =93186752^GetTSC;
I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed that god would be quite so deterministic.


he's now using Donald Knuth's LCG http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Kernel/KMathB.html


God does not throw dice. Apparently, he does use a linear congruential RNG.


Now how does free will come into this?


Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/221/


No, not relevant. I wish someone would invent an ad blocker that instead blocked all gratuitous references to xkcd (i.e. all of them)


The God/code part might have some sort of logic to it, but he also likes to go on rants about "the CIA Niggers" that are completely incoherent


If you think it's easy to understand that some people believe in God while others don't you probably aren't curious enough :)




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