3 ms·
> This thing passes Big Crush and PractRand ... for the seeds that were tested. In theory, you can get unlucky and end up in a short cycle, and it will not pa
by clarry 7y ago
> This thing passes Big Crush and PractRand
... for the seeds that were tested.
In theory, you can get unlucky and end up in a short cycle, and it will not pass these tests.
That's why I'm not comfortable with it, when there are generators with a known, guaranteed period. They simply do not have this failure mode.
- FabHK 7y agoThe probability of the problem occurring is vanishingly small - much smaller than a bit flip due to a cosmic ray in the machine computing it, leading to a wrong answer or a crash. And even that doesn’t matter, because the computations are repeated so often. Again, the application determines what the most suitable PRNG is.
- MarkOverton 7y agoThat's why I pointed out that the probability of a too-short cycle or sequence-overlap is no higher than that of randomly selecting one snowflake out of all snowflakes in Earth's history. Also, the paper has a graph and accompanying discussion of what happens with the shorter cycles.