1992-11-17 - Idea on Random Number Generators

Header Data

From: phr@napa.Telebit.COM (Paul Rubin)
To: hugh@toad.com
Message Hash: a5d0e107d8ec7201bc43ac0a662f035174de01361bc761faf902cbd812f72657
Message ID: <9211170318.AA25949@napa.TELEBIT.COM>
Reply To: <9211170302.AA02806@domingo.teracons.com>
UTC Datetime: 1992-11-17 03:19:15 UTC
Raw Date: Mon, 16 Nov 92 19:19:15 PST

Raw message

From: phr@napa.Telebit.COM (Paul Rubin)
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 92 19:19:15 PST
To: hugh@toad.com
Subject: Idea on Random Number Generators
In-Reply-To: <9211170302.AA02806@domingo.teracons.com>
Message-ID: <9211170318.AA25949@napa.TELEBIT.COM>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


It is very hard to generate really random numbers no matter what you do.
See the famous RAND book "One Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal
Deviates" for their adventures trying to generate random numbers by
counting particle emissions from a radioactive source.  Even after
all kinds of statistical massaging there were still correlations in the
output.





Thread