Subject: Biblio re>randomness and OTPs Response was sufficient to merit posting this (brief and specific) bibliography pertaining to a) randomness; b) testing for randomness; and c) compression and coding as it relates to privacy and maximizing entropy. The items are listed in the order that *I* think represents their helpfulness on this topic. Two interesting quotes from Knuth (book [1] below): (sec3.2.2 para2 p25) One of the common fallacies encountered in connection with random number generation is the idea that we can take a good generator and modify it a little, in order get and "even-more-random" sequence. (sect3.3 para4 p38) ...The point of these remarks is that we cannot be trusted to judge by ourselves whether a sequence of numbers is random or not. Some unbiased mechanical tests must be applied. Books ========== [1] "The Art of Computer Programming, vol 2: Seminumerical Algorithms" by Donald Knuth. ISBN 0-201-03822-6 Sections of interest: (3) Random Numbers [2] "Text Compression" by Bell, Cleary and Witten. ISBN 0-13-911991-4 Sections of interest: (5) From Probablilities to Bits, especially (5.2) Arithmetic Coding (7.3) Dynamic Markov Modeling (10.1.5) Privacy and Compression [3] "Adaptive Data Compression" by Ross N. Williams. ISBN 0-7923-9085-7 Sections of interest: (1.9) Arithmetic Coding (1.10.6.8) DMC (1.16) Error Correction, Data Compression and Cryptography [4] "Image and Text Compression" edited by Storer. ISBN 0-7923-9243-4 Sections of interest: (4) 'Practical mplementations of Arithmetic Coding' by Howard and Vitter. Papers ========== [5] "A note on the DMC data compression scheme" by Bell and Moffat. [6] "Universal Coding, Information, Prediction, and Estimation" by Rissanen. [7] "Linear Time Adaptive Arithmetic Coding" by Moffat. [8] "A Simple General Binary Source Code" by Langdon and Rissanen. [9] "An overview of the basic principles of the Q-Coder adaptive binary arithmetic coder" by Pennebaker, Mitchell, Langdon and Arps. [10] "Software implementations fo the Q-Coder" by Mitchell and Pennebaker. [11] "Optimal hardware and sofware arithmetic coding procedures for the Q-Coder" by Mitchell and Pennebaker. [5] "Probability estimation for the Q-Coder" by Pennebaker and Mitchell. I hope you find this information helpful. Scott Collins (Scott_Collins@genmagic.com)