The Box is a major cultural and heritage attraction and archive, which opened in Plymouth’s city centre in September 2020. Its collection, formally the South West Film and Television Archive (SWFTA), is the regional film archive for the South West of England, comprising the combined programme libraries of Westward Television and Television South West (TSW). It also includes a significant number of donated film collections dating back to the early 1890s.
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Plymouth's Random Number Generator
Mrs Gadget and the Randomiser. Drawing lottery numbers in Plymouth's first lotto
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Overview
An official from Plymouth City Council draws the City of Plymouth’s first lottery numbers using a new digital system at the Civic Centre building. The Random Number Generator or RNG is a computerised way of generating numbers which lack any sequence or pattern. RNGs are now used in many government-run lotteries.
The idea of randomness is not new and has been carried out mechanically since ancient times, coin flipping, dice rolling or the shuffling of playing cards but in mathematics and statistics since computerisation and the development of computational RNGs, it has become an important tool although many methods have been found not to have achieved the goal of true randomness as patterns usually emerge. An act passed in 1976 legalised small lotteries, the City of Plymouth Lottery draws were at this time held in the Civic Centre. The National Lottery was established by John Major’s conservative government in 1994.
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