Smaller than milliseconds?

[xbury.cs at clearstream.com]

Not to sound like a specialist but I've read quite a bit on randomness 
theory.

1st, nothing is truely random. 
Calculating something truely random is of truely infinite complexity.

2nd, celular automata are just like digits in a number (or sequence of #s)
 BUT consider each to be individually picked based on some neighbor number 
rules
Meaning one affects the other... This means there is a pattern - it's 
time-based! 

If you want truely random without much fuss do this:
take a serie of long numbers 
pick random digits in them
associate them randomly... 
repeat a random number of times...

This can easily be done picking some random digits in random picks of the 
milliseconds.

Last but not least...

To make it even more random, you can change the randomseed global before 
any use
of the random function... 

And even make sure that any pick is not = to the last or within a Standard 
deviation of last
picked choices... 

How much more random do you want?

cheers
Xavier


On 11/07/2003 00:34:16 metacard-admin wrote:
>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
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>metacard mailing list
>metacard at lists.runrev.com
>http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard

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