Pi: Less Random Than We Thought

[Eugen Leitl]

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]