On Thu, 3 Oct 1996, geeman@best.com wrote:
Seems to me that a _subset_ of all possible keys is much more likely to appear than a random selection from an equidistributed population 0..2^56.
This is a contradiction. Unless you were defining "subset" using a specific weakness in a specific RNG, in which case your argument would have been a tautology, saying nothing.
(P)RNG's just aren't that likely to produce a key of 010101010..... nor 001100110011... etc etc and I have been thinking about how one might formalize and exploit this randomness property to increase the probability of finding the key sooner.
RNG's are written to maximize randomness of of the numerical _value_ of the integer, independent of any arbitrary radix, including binary. The "property" you describe is imaginary. Like the Gambler's Fallacy, it's an artifact of our own cognitive functioning, and does not exist in the real world. . . . The radix is 13. The answer is 42. The question is "What do you get when you multiply 6 by 9?" Let any search begin with self-knowledge... Douglas B. Renner