Messages in this thread |  | | From | (Thomas Koenig) | Subject | Re: CONFIG_RANDOM option for 1.99.2 | Date | 23 May 1996 16:41:18 +0200 |
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>And finally random.c is not as random as You may beleve. Start it on an >otherwise not busy machine to see why! Yust do cat /dev/random and see >the random numbers coming precisely after any keybord hit. This isn't >acceptable for any number cruching,
Of course you don't use /dev/random for number crunching. If you want a really strong random number generator, you'd use /dev/urandom.
OTOH, for Monte Carlo simulation etc., you don't want really random numbers. Your best bet would be a good (and I emphasize GOOD) random number genetator (you can base it on MD5, for example), which you feed with different seed values. Keeping the seed values around is a good idea in case you want reproducible results (like running the same program with different optimization settings to see if anything breaks).
>In fact it was a Montecarlo integration, which made me sceptical >about /dev/random or /dev/urandom.
The algorithms in /dev/urandom are believed to be very strong. If you can point out any weaknesses they have in Monte Carlo integration, please post your results to sci.crypt.research. You'll cause a minor revolution there.
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