Random vs Algorithmic

After hitting a dead end with the random website generator, I have decided to take a different path. My new idea came from looking at the website infosthetics.com. On there, they visualise data in lots of innovative ways. These two examples from the website use an algorithm based on the digits in Pi.

http://www.avoision.com/experiments/pi10k/index.php

http://flickr.com/photos/peewack/102585611/in/set-72157594180898707/

The music or image is made from the numbers, but are they picked at random? Not strictly, as the writer of the software is aware of the algorithm, and so has made a choice. Having said that, the list of digits has probably been pasted from somewhere like this:

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~smillie/Pi10000.html

The algorithm and in fact the program have nothing to do with pi or with circles, but rather use the digits in pi as data. As most people only know pi up to 5 or so decimal places, the numbers after that are in a way being randomly selected.

A way to cancel any doubt as to whether this idea is random or not is to introduce input from a third party: Interactivity.

With the coloured pi image above, the colours were selected by the creator, which stopped it becoming random. If the colours were selected by someone else, simply asked to put a colour next to each digit and not told about the algorithm, you could say the colours have been randomly selected. The picture would look different every time too.

Algorithm + Interactivity = Random

I need to write a piece of software that just asks people to fill in text boxes, then uses that data to create some artworks.