Ask anyone to scatter dots "randomly" and they'll spread them out evenly, like seeds in a garden bed. But that's not what randomness looks like. Real randomness clumps, clusters here, empty voids there, streaks that look almost deliberate. The night sky is the proof: stars fall into constellations, galaxies into clusters and filaments, all because random density seeds clump together. If randomness spread evenly, the universe would be a featureless gray fog. Clumpiness is why there's anything to look at at all.
So here's a way to see it. A random number generator spits out a long stream of numbers between 0 and 1. Read them three at a time and you get an (x, y, z) coordinate, a point in space. Do that a few hundred thousand times and you've built a galaxy. Drag to orbit it. The thing rotates on its own until you grab it.
How to read it
Start on Mulberry32, a good modern generator. That clumpy cloud, with its dense knots and hollow voids, is exactly what healthy randomness looks like. Switch to Math.random (your browser's built-in) and you won't be able to tell them apart. That's not a bug; it's the point. You cannot beat a good generator by eye.
Now switch to RANDU and slowly rotate. For a moment it looks like ordinary space, then the points snap onto roughly fifteen flat planes. RANDU was IBM's standard generator for years, shipped in real scientific software, and it has this catastrophic hidden structure baked in. "Random numbers fall mainly in the planes," as the famous 1968 paper put it. It's the most beautiful failure in computing, and you can only see it in three dimensions, which is the whole reason this thing is a galaxy and not a scatter plot.
The lesson hiding in the difference: clumpy is healthy. Hidden structure (planes, lattices, repeats) is what broken randomness looks like. The LCG generator sits in between: fine at a glance, but its points ride a faint regular grid if you look closely.
This is an early build. Next come the things that make it beautiful rather than merely correct: bloom, then a volumetric nebula whose glow is driven by where the points actually clump, then live instruments that measure the clumpiness as you fly, knobs to break a generator yourself, and many more generators to visit. For now: orbit RANDU until the planes appear. That alone is worth the trip.