What this comes down to is that you just can't arbitrarily choose a random number and hope that it meets your needs.
You have to understand what properties you actually care about and choose a (P)RNG that has those properties.
A Brief History of Random Numbers
11–20 of 55 posts
Re: A Brief History of Random Numbers
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like a lot of early machines, ICCE was made in part from ex-GPO relays. (ie, it was electromechanical.) Valves were more expensive and relays were flooding the market post-war. Guess which WW2 activity used a very large number of relays, and was made by the GPO (who used relays heavily in telephony), and was subsequently discontinued by the GPO at wars end as things to do with encoding and decoding scaled back thus f…
Seems like a click baiting kind of question that I'd surely Bombe. I ended up mainly doing geophysical field work with a lot of aquisition, processing, and interpretation coding work .. but I dabbled in symbolic computer algebra systems (in Australia) for a while and loitered a little in technical history of the borderline classified - I interviewed "for the record" Leonard Beadell, Jack Wong Sue, Mark Oliphant, peop…
"that I'd surely Bombe" <- nice bletchley park/enigma pun. Bravo!
Re: A Brief History of Random Numbers
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like a click baiting kind of question that I'd surely Bombe. I ended up mainly doing geophysical field work with a lot of aquisition, processing, and interpretation coding work .. but I dabbled in symbolic computer algebra systems (in Australia) for a while and loitered a little in technical history of the borderline classified - I interviewed "for the record" Leonard Beadell, Jack Wong Sue, Mark Oliphant, peop…
"that I'd surely Bombe" <- nice bletchley park/enigma pun. Bravo!
Not bad, but I regretted not adding more [Pp]olish . . .
Re: A Brief History of Random Numbers
#14These are mostly about PRNG, not true random sources. brief funny story. My dad built the 5th computer in the UK, ICCE [0] and one of the tests they wanted to run was statistical analysis over random number fields. They approached the General Post Office (GPO) which had an RNG called "ernie" [1] which ran the postal investment bond lottery. This is a true RNG, based on radio device avalanche diode behaviour (actually…
Wow! Also, I think [0] is the first Wikipedia I have come across that doesn’t have a lead section at all.
s/doesn't/didn't/ but it's probably grossly inadequate.
Re: A Brief History of Random Numbers
#15It amused me that my college statistics textbook had an appendix of random numbers in the back of the book. Just a long list of numbers generated at random and then immortalized on the same medium as ancient texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls. I guess that's the best we had for students before the widespread adoption of computers?
The RAND corporation published a book filled with just random digits.
Re: A Brief History of Random Numbers
#16It amused me that my college statistics textbook had an appendix of random numbers in the back of the book. Just a long list of numbers generated at random and then immortalized on the same medium as ancient texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls. I guess that's the best we had for students before the widespread adoption of computers?
The RAND corporation published a book filled with just random digits. https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1418.html
Hilariously, there’s an Errata available.
Re: A Brief History of Random Numbers
#17Pseudo-random!
A new programmer reading this article would come away with the impression that, if they need random numbers, they should use xorshift or PCG, when in reality they should be calling getentropy(), or, if a syscall is too expensive, using a CSPRNG (e.g. ChaCha or BLAKE3) seeded with getentropy(). We now have RNGs that are both secure and really, really fast -- multiple GB/s fast -- so there are very few circumstances where a PRNG is truly necessary.
Re: A Brief History of Random Numbers
#18These are mostly about PRNG, not true random sources. brief funny story. My dad built the 5th computer in the UK, ICCE [0] and one of the tests they wanted to run was statistical analysis over random number fields. They approached the General Post Office (GPO) which had an RNG called "ernie" [1] which ran the postal investment bond lottery. This is a true RNG, based on radio device avalanche diode behaviour (actually…
ERNIE sounds kind of fascinating. And somewhat amusing.
Going off on a tangent: An oft-neglected issue is that, even when the random source (like avalanched diodes) is actually sufficiently random, any apparatus that captures that randomness for use inherently causes a bias in the observations.
Even if everything else is perfect (it usually isn't), in terms of signal processing, any observation window (e.g. a finite length of time of measurement) is an aperture which ends up getting convolved with the signal source being observed.
It sometimes helps to convert the skew into white noise with a "whitening" post-pass algorithm.
Using real life randomness is still a good thing to do, of course, it's just that are always real world issues with anything and everything.
Re: A Brief History of Random Numbers
#19It amused me that my college statistics textbook had an appendix of random numbers in the back of the book. Just a long list of numbers generated at random and then immortalized on the same medium as ancient texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls. I guess that's the best we had for students before the widespread adoption of computers?
The RAND corporation published a book filled with just random digits. https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1418.html
Guess it’s only fitting.
Re: A Brief History of Random Numbers
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
The RAND corporation published a book filled with just random digits. https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1418.html
Hilariously, there’s an Errata available.
I revisited this in 2020 and found some additional things, separate from that errata. All my code is available here: https://github.com/RANDCorporation/milliondigits
And there's a news article about it here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/rand-million-random-digits-numb...