[Tutor] How trustworthy are pseudo-random numbers?

[Andre Engels]

On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 4:11 PM, Daniele <d.conca at gmail.com> wrote:
> >From here
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_generator#Periodicity
> and here
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_twister#Advantages
>
> I think it can be argued that the randomness is pretty trustworthy :o)

Nice understatement on that last page - "most applications do not
require 2^19937 unique combinations (2^19937 is approximately 4.315425
× 10^6001)."

If you used every atom in the known universe as a computer, then let
them turn out a billion combinations a second for the entire time
since the big bang, and call the number of combination you get then
N...
then take N computers turning out N combinations a second for the
entire time since the big bang, and call the number of combinations
they turn out N2...
then take N2 computers turning out N2 combinations a second and call
the number of combination they turn out in the time since the big bang
and call that N3...
then the number of combinations turned out by N3 computers turning out
N3 combinations per second in the time since the big bang STILL
dwarves in comparison to that number.


-- 
André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com