Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/01/1759240 Posted by: timothy, on 2005-05-01 18:26:00 from the at-least-statistically dept. [1]Autoversicherung writes "Physicists including Purdue's Ephraim Fischbach have completed a study [2]comparing the 'randomness' in pi to that produced by 30 software random-number generators and one chaos-generating physical machine. After conducting several tests, they have found that while sequences of digits from pi are indeed an acceptable source of randomness -- often an important factor in data encryption and in solving certain physics problems -- pi's digit string does not always produce randomness as effectively as manufactured generators do." References 1. https://autoversicherung.einsurance.de/ 2. http://news.uns.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/2005/050426.Fischbach.pi.html ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]