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On Melissa O’Neill’s PCG random number generator

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Re: On Melissa O’Neill’s PCG random number generator

#61

Post by pizza »

thanatropism wrote: post #36
lowmagnet wrote: post #4

I like this because she is a professor at Harvey Mudd. They took steps to make CS more inclusive, with great results. I appreciate her attitude on accessibility, which is in keeping with that institution's philosophy. That she ran into a paper wall doesn't bother her because she's openly publishing is even better.

There's room for accessible and for abstruse literature. Usually what happens with novel work is that initial publications are abstruse but met with excitement by the scholarly community and gradually more accessible works (as the number of collaborators/coauthors grows too) are published. That said, even if multi-culti math means that top-line researchers are going to be spending time with song-and-dance introductio…

Well, Harvey Mudd is an undergrad-only STEM school, so I'm not sure having a grad student edit it would have been possible.

Re: On Melissa O’Neill’s PCG random number generator

#62

Post by greggyb »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #60
greggyb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Consider the set P {p1, p2, ... pN} representing providers and the set c {c1, c2, ... cN} representing customers" versus "Consider the set P of providers and the set C of customers" The former is about 2x the length of the latter. This is the verbosity I read into the original comment.

The first is required when you want to later refer to an individual element from the set. "Consider the set P of providers" means when you eventually refer to p_2, you'll have to note that you mean an element (the second, in some sense) of P. That moved the verbosity around rather than eliminating it. To me it seems like a much bigger error that "Consider the set P {p_1, p_2, ... p_N} representing providers and the s…

If this is a commonly used notation in the paper, then it would make sense to state once up front "here's how we refer to sets and their members". DRY and all that.

Re: On Melissa O’Neill’s PCG random number generator

#63

Post by carapace »

Houshalter wrote: post #56

I once tried to develop my own fast random number generate using nothing but bitwise operations. On the theory they were the fastest/simplest. I had a program generate thousands of random combinations of bitwise functions. And then used statistical tests to see which ones produced the most "random" seeming behavior. It worked as far as I can tell. But I don't trust the statistical tests. Who is to say there isn't a v…

> How do you prove a random number generator is good?

Compress its output.

Re: On Melissa O’Neill’s PCG random number generator

#64

Post by thanatropism »

pizza wrote: post #61
thanatropism wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's room for accessible and for abstruse literature. Usually what happens with novel work is that initial publications are abstruse but met with excitement by the scholarly community and gradually more accessible works (as the number of collaborators/coauthors grows too) are published. That said, even if multi-culti math means that top-line researchers are going to be spending time with song-and-dance introductio…

Well, Harvey Mudd is an undergrad-only STEM school, so I'm not sure having a grad student edit it would have been possible.

Well, her peers in her research program probably have grad students...

I mean, she's working in collaboration with someone, right?

Re: On Melissa O’Neill’s PCG random number generator

#65

Post by eridius »

fwdpropaganda wrote: post #57
eridius wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quantum process is a random process, but isn't it still an open philosophical question as to whether the "random process" we observe is truly random, or is instead governed by deterministic hidden state?

No, all theories of (local) hidden variables have been experimentally ruled out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem > Bell's theorem states that any physical theory that incorporates local realism cannot reproduce all the predictions of quantum mechanical theory. Because numerous experiments agree with the predictions of quantum mechanical theory, and show differences between correlations that could not b…

Interesting. But it sounds like non-local hidden variables are still possible. My assumption is that non-local hidden variables is non-falsifiable, which is why I said this was a philosophical question.

Re: On Melissa O’Neill’s PCG random number generator

#66

Post by thanatropism »

dsacco wrote: post #21
CalChris wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is exactly what peer review should do, to determine whether the idea has merit. But that isn't what has happened. Peer review which is a cornerstone to the academic/scientific community stumbled on style and didn't get to merit.

I disagree, I think the peer review functioned exactly as it was supposed to. Her paper doesn't pass the sniff test for me whatsoever when it comes to security analysis. She spent close to no time analyzing the primitives she introduced (and with no proofs or rigor!), meanwhile the thing is 58 pages because she takes the time to explain what "determinism" and "seeds" are to her audience. "Exposition" is, in my opinio…

> papers with truly novel results will suddenly be hundreds of pages and tens of pages of setup.

We're already there with Inter-universal Teichmüller Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-universal_Teichm%C3%BCll...), the entire mathematical field singlehandedly created by Mochizuki to prove the ABC Conjecture. Mochizuki worked in isolation and astounded the world by revealing all of this at once.

Now, the world's top mathematicians have been so impressed with whatever they've managed to understand from Mochizuki's papers that big efforts are being made to unravel it, getting Mochizuki to teach lectures, etc. As best as I know it, the entire thing hasn't been independently verified -- it's such a tall stack of novel mathematics.

Now: we can chastise Mochizuki for not playing within the ordinary rules of math research (publish ongoing research, etc.), or acclaim him as a genius having produced fundamental, discontinuous advances in his field... or we can do both.

I wouldn't blame people for holding off on "using" Mochizuki's results (they're too abstract for that, but anyway) because the whole thing is so obscure still. What's more: I wouldn't hold skepticism on Mochizuki as an example of academia being too self-referential. The academic rat race is supposed to keep these things from happening by imposing some structure on the production of knowledge.

Re: On Melissa O’Neill’s PCG random number generator

#67

Post by a_t48 »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #55
lfowles wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah. I used double asterisks, should have seen that coming in hindsight. Muphry's Law.

I've often been frustrated trying to put more than one asterisk (not italic tag) in an HN comment. Serious question, what happened to WYSIWYG? The Web has supported it for like 20 years, why have we standardized on clunky in-line markup for rich text entry, pretty much everywhere?

WYSIWYG is kinda crap on mobile. A checkbox saying "Don't format" would be nice, though.

Re: On Melissa O’Neill’s PCG random number generator

#68

Post by [deleted] »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #55
lfowles wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah. I used double asterisks, should have seen that coming in hindsight. Muphry's Law.

I've often been frustrated trying to put more than one asterisk (not italic tag) in an HN comment. Serious question, what happened to WYSIWYG? The Web has supported it for like 20 years, why have we standardized on clunky in-line markup for rich text entry, pretty much everywhere?

[deleted]

Re: On Melissa O’Neill’s PCG random number generator

#69

Post by [deleted] »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #55
lfowles wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah. I used double asterisks, should have seen that coming in hindsight. Muphry's Law.

I've often been frustrated trying to put more than one asterisk (not italic tag) in an HN comment. Serious question, what happened to WYSIWYG? The Web has supported it for like 20 years, why have we standardized on clunky in-line markup for rich text entry, pretty much everywhere?

[deleted]

Re: On Melissa O’Neill’s PCG random number generator

#70

Post by dminor »

thanatropism wrote: post #64
pizza wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Harvey Mudd is an undergrad-only STEM school, so I'm not sure having a grad student edit it would have been possible.

Well, her peers in her research program probably have grad students... I mean, she's working in collaboration with someone , right?

In the history of the paper she mentions some summer research, but that is for undergrads. Harvey Mudd is all undergrad and tends to emphasize teaching over research (at least, that was the philosophy 20 years ago o_O).
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