I'm sure that's the etymology but fuzzing isn't exactly random. That's kinda the point of it.

-rob


On Fri, May 24, 2024 at 5:18 PM Ralph Corderoy <ralph@inputplus.co.uk> wrote:
Hi,

Rob wrote:
> "Fuzzing" as it is now called (for no reason I can intuit)

Barton Miller describes coining the term.

   ‘That night, I was logged on to the Unix system in my office via
    a dial-up phone line over a 1200 baud modem.  ...
    I wanted a name that would evoke the feeling of random, unstructured
    data.  After trying out several ideas, I settled on the term “fuzz”.’

        — https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~bart/fuzz/Foreword1.html

Line noise inspired him, as he describes.

--
Cheers, Ralph.