At 15:20 1994/07/07 -0500, Jim choate wrote: ...
Does anybody know of a good test for randomness? I would definitely like to know how good computer RNG's are. Post away!
A good RNG must pass all such tests. The idea of just one test is itself dangerous. It would be a generous person who would collect such tests and organize them to a common interface. Only then would you begin to have "one test": the collection of these tests. I coded a blum filter a few years ago which requires about 16,000 random bits. I tried several prngs in various libraries, then implemented several from literature including Knuth. All of these caused the filter to work at about half efficiency. I could find no bugs in the filter code. Then I recalled that there was a DES routine available. I used DES to generate the random bits. The filter then worked close to the theoritical maximum!