31–40 of 56 posts
As a computer scientist, one wonders what kind of randomness? Is the date picked uniformly at random, or is there a bias involved (for example, a negative bias towards the coming days)?
That reminds me of something I've been thinking about again and again over the past years. Is there any reliable way to send myself a message that I would receive, say, 40 years from today. So far I haven't been able to come up with a good solution.
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Just curious...why exactly would you say reseeding adds bias? AFAIK, srand in Perl on Linux uses /dev/urandom, which uses at least some bits from the hardware entropy pool. Swapped out rand() for MT in any case... :)
Wow, that was fast. Nice. The truth is this: if you ever hear the phrase "re-seeding", you should reinterpret it as "warning! danger!" because if you seed a random number generator more than once, you destroy any entropy ('true' randomness) that generator otherwise might've had. When you seed a generator, you're saying "give me a queue of uniformly random numbers. Each time I call rand(), pop one from the queue and r…
I asked the question in relation to the LC generators in stdlib, where it seemed like reseeding from the (probably MT? I believe BSD uses Yarrow) generator in /dev/urandom would actually result in more entropy than the internal state of the LC generator in Perl/C stdlib. Totally agree with not reseeding MT though -- I have it in a persistent FastCGI script with an initial seed from /dev/random now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, that was fast. Nice. The truth is this: if you ever hear the phrase "re-seeding", you should reinterpret it as "warning! danger!" because if you seed a random number generator more than once, you destroy any entropy ('true' randomness) that generator otherwise might've had. When you seed a generator, you're saying "give me a queue of uniformly random numbers. Each time I call rand(), pop one from the queue and r…
I'm very familiar with MT from my PhD research :) It's a nugget of gold hidden in a single .c file. I asked the question in relation to the LC generators in stdlib, where it seemed like reseeding from the (probably MT? I believe BSD uses Yarrow) generator in /dev/urandom would actually result in more entropy than the internal state of the LC generator in Perl/C stdlib. Totally agree with not reseeding MT though -- I…
I'm using this to propose to my girlfriend.
That reminds me of something I've been thinking about again and again over the past years. Is there any reliable way to send myself a message that I would receive, say, 40 years from today. So far I haven't been able to come up with a good solution.
Lets say you get cheapo hosting @ $5/month. 40 years = $2400, which isn't a terrible investment. Although you'd probably want a VPS where you can ensure that the OS setup doesn't change over 40 years...
That reminds me of something I've been thinking about again and again over the past years. Is there any reliable way to send myself a message that I would receive, say, 40 years from today. So far I haven't been able to come up with a good solution.