As a fellow programmer I have always found this problem to be
intrguing and annoying. I just never took the time to figure out that
the cycle was 16M elements. When I was first learning to program in
high school on a Commodore Pet, I couldn't figure out why my newly
coded Yahtzee program wouldn't work. The game started the same every
time. My teacher pointed me in the right direction and after a little
assembly hacking, I finally got to play a different game.

As to the question of whether there is anything truly random,
perspective has a lot to do with it. I believe life is a sequence of
connected events. It would not have been my son getting hit by a
pitch in last night's little league game, if my father had not brought
a computer home when I was 13 (thereby wetting my interest in
computers, causing me to choose the college I did, where I met my
wife, which is how I have this 11 year old son 25 years later). To
all of the other people at the game, it was purely random that my son
was up then and got hit (no injury).

But I digress. The important thing for all of us is that the people
responsible for maintaining and improving this great game care enough
to dig into these details and exercise the programs that much during
testing. To them we owe a debt of thanks.

To Steve and crew, thanks for a continued job well done.

Chris Pulsifer