Re: Random Number Generation -----> Hardware or Software?

From: Gavin Scott (gavin_at_allegro.com)
Date: 03/15/05 

Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 00:32:45 -0000

In comp.arch Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.theworld.com> wrote:
> Ada has some requirements on the built-in (pseudo) random number
> generators. See:

> http://www.adaic.org/standards/95aarm/html/AA-G-2-5.html

> I don't really understand this stuff. Does it result in "terrible",
> as you say, output?

Nice short summary of Knuth's tests for randomness in there.

But it only requires a period of 2^31-1, which certainly isn't useful
for security applications (given a very small number of sequential
outputs from such a generator you can predict the next value to be
generated with fairly high probability etc.).

Looks like a nice formal requirement that the PRNG at least not be
abysmally bad :-)

But those requirements still don't get you a PRNG that you'd want to
use for any serious application I think.

Offhand I don't recall whether the simple linear congruential generators
can be constructed to pass Knuth's tests or not (Knuth probably says).

G.

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