Smaller than milliseconds?

[Shrink2Fit at aol.com]

Nelson,

If you're looking for a random number generator you should check out "a 
new kind of science" by stephen wolfram. They are using an automata to 
generate a map that contains extremely (he claimed completely) random 
sequences. This should not be a computationally intensive process and, 
again according to him, gives good randomness (good enough to be the 
random number generation technique used in mathematica where the audience 
is made up of picky people who actually care). He mentioned this as an 
aside during a lecture at xerox parc, so I suspect the full algorithm is 
somewhat more complex. Interesting stuff.

YMMV.

J/



metacard at lists.runrev.com wrote on 7/10/2003 3:11 PM

>Microseconds? Now we're talkin'.
>
>OK, here's the deal:
>A high quality Random Number Generator (RNG) needs two things: a good seed
>and a clever algorithm to turn the seed into pattern-less numbers. A good
>seed is one that's unpredictable. And for good security RNGs, the seed often
>comes from some real world event--quantum stuff like radioactive decay or
>chaos stuff like lava lamps. (see the current WIRED, p. 88) For low-level
>security or something with no security concerns one can use computer clock
>time and be done with it.
>
>My idea is this: the time it takes to run some little bit of code isn't
>predictable (temperature of the processor and about a zillion other factors)
>and changes from moment to moment, and is specific to every local machine
>and circumstance. So it might be possible to write a very secure RNG that
>uses the unpredictability of run time for the seed.
>
>So, compute something meaningless like deriving God's last name (about a
>half second) and use the run time as a good unpredictable seed for the rest
>of the RNG. Thus it would be possible to have a high quality RNG based in
>software alone.
>
>Also:
>set the numberformat to "0.00000000000000000000"
>put the long seconds
>
>Punches up the fraction with digits other than zeros, where they come from I
>don't know.
>
>Nelson



-------------------
Jonathan Feinstein
Shrink2Fit Software