March 27, 2009
7:08 p.m.
On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 9:17 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote:
Adam Olsen writes: > "Not broken for small lists" implies it IS broken for large lists.
You're being contentious. It logically implies no such thing, nor is it idiomatically an implication among consenting adults. And in any case, the phrasing I recommended is "guaranteed to have uniform distribution of shuffles up to N". The implication of "no guarantee" is "have a mechanic inspect it before you buy", not "this is a lemon".
We'll have to agree to disagree there. The irony is that we only seed with 128 bits, so rather than 2**19937 combinations, there's just 2**128. That drops our "safe" list size down to 34. Weee! -- Adam Olsen, aka Rhamphoryncus