20 December 2004

Random numbers

I've still got cryptography on the brain from reading Cryptonomicon (so I'm going to be drinking cosmos after reading the DeLillo?!?), and probably will for a while. Looks like the rest of the Internet does also. Here's a collection from 1955 titled A Million Random Digits published by RAND [Wikipedia]. Good random numbers are hard to come by computationally, so I assume this was a good crib in the early days of computation. I pointed out recently how truly random numbers must come from natural systems, not calculated. This document from 1959 titled A Generator of Random Numbers contains a description of how to create a random number generator to attach to a computer. Plug-and-play?

[ via BoingBoing -> A Million Random Digits ]

[ via Schneier on Security -> A Generator of Random Numbers (2 meg PDF) ]

[ posted by sstrader on 20 December 2004 at 11:04:36 AM in Science & Technology ]