[Gllug] entropykey: why did nobody ever mention this thing before?

[Andrew Back]

On (16:53 02/08/10), Andrew Farnsworth wrote:
> I know several people who have used large quantities of random numbers and
> could definitely have used something like this as they were running out.  In
> case anyone wants to know what running out means, it means looping around
> and starting the list over.  If you have not used the random number
> generator in most PCs and Languages today, you may not realise that they are
> really pseudo random in that they are generated using a formula on a seed
> number to get a new number which it returns as the random result and then
> uses the new number as a seed for the next.  This produces a very long
> string of numbers that to all intents and purposes is random... unless you
> use so many of them that the algorithm starts back over on the list of
> numbers.  My friend was a PhD candidate and was seeing patterns in her data
> that just could not be explained, she finally tracked it down to the random
> number generator and the fact that she was using orders of magnitude more
> numbers than the algorithm could produce.  She ended up buying a very large
> set of random numbers (who would have thought that was a product) so it is
> nice to see this type of setup where you can get random numbers generated
> simply and easily.  She probably would have still purchased the large block
> of random numbers as she was using them much faster than the Key here would
> generate them so it was better for her to purchase a large block than to
> have to wait for the numbers to be generated.

The erm, RAND Corporation, have reissued their classic 1955 publication 'A
Million Random Digits' at the discounted web price of $81 :

http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1418/index.html

A gripping 628 page read, no less.

Cheers,

Andrew

PS. I must admit to having been tempted to buy this because, well, just
because.

-- 
Andrew Back
mailto:andrew at osmosoft.com
http://carrierdetect.com
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