PHP rand function (or not so rand)

Posted by Badr Hari on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Badr Hari
Published on 2011-11-24T19:16:28Z Indexed on 2011/11/25 2:17 UTC
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I was testing PHP rand function to write on a image. Of course the output shows that it's not so random. The code I used:

<?php 
header('Content-Type: image/png');
$lenght = 512;
$im = imagecreatetruecolor($lenght, $lenght);
$blue = imagecolorallocate($im, 0, 255, 255);
for ($y = 0; $y < $lenght; $y++) {
    for ($x = 0; $x < $lenght; $x++) {
        if (rand(0,1) == 0) {
            imagesetpixel($im, $x, $y, $blue);
        }
    }
}       
imagepng($im);
imagedestroy($im);
?>

My question is, if I use image width/lenght (variable $lenght in this example) number like 512, 256 or 1024, it is very clear that it's not so random. When I change the variable to 513 for an example, it is so much harder for human eye to detect it. Why is that? What is so special about these numbers?

512:

512 pixels

513:

513 pixels

Edit: I'm running xampp on Windows to test it.

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