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Reminds me of a quote I saw somewhere

Reminds me of a quote I saw somewhere

Posted May 11, 2006 6:43 UTC (Thu) by toreanderson (guest, #14736)
Parent article: On the safety of Linux random numbers

«Random number generation is too important to be left to chance» :-)

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Reminds me of a quote I saw somewhere

Posted May 11, 2006 22:18 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Wikipedia says this is due to Robert Coveyou.

Myself I prefer Knuth's line (from the introduction to TAOCP chapter 3) that (in italics) `random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random'. He then goes on to provide several examples of awful PRNGs, such as the original rand(), and shows why they're bad...

(... and a few pages later, whose name pops up, but Robert Coveyou!)


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