I'm a Computer Science student and am currently enrolled in System Simulation & Modelling course. It involves dealing with everyday systems around us and simulating them in different scenarios by generating random numbers in different distributional curves, like IID, Gaussian etc. for instance. I've been working on the boids project and a question just struck me that what exactly "random" really is? I mean, for instance, every random number that we generate, even in our programming languages like via the Math.random()
method in Java, essentially is generated following an "algorithm".
How do we really know that a sequence of numbers that we produce is in fact, random and would it help us, to simulate a certain model as accurately as possible?