On Thu, 11 Jul 2002, Sandy Harris wrote:
No. Any good algorithm should produce output that looks /exactly/ like random noise, hence they should all look like each other.
Wrong, not all RNG's have the same statistical output. There is -nothing- in the requirement for a RNG that requires it (radiation sources are not equiprobable for example, they're much more 'zero' than 'one'). There may be boundary conditions on crypto applications that require equiprobable distributions with respect to characters or strings (that 'k' thing again, see Knuth). But that doesn't apply to -all- RNG's or their applications by a long shot. Also, 'random noise' is redundent. 'Noise' is by -definition- random, otherwise it wouldn't be noise, it would have a correlation factor, once you found it you could remove the noise (assuming of course its computationaly tractible). -- ____________________________________________________________________ When I die, I would like to be born again as me. Hugh Hefner ravage@ssz.com www.ssz.com jchoate@open-forge.org www.open-forge.org --------------------------------------------------------------------