new idea for random number generation

Georgi Guninski guninski at guninski.com
Tue Aug 8 06:11:54 PDT 2017


On Sun, Aug 06, 2017 at 07:08:25PM -0700, Ryan Carboni wrote:
> One time, during my days as a paid, professional DM, I had been running a
> free game for some people I was involved with at the time, and the brother
> of the person I was most involved with at the time came up to me and made a
> rather incredible statement.
>
PRNGs sometimes have ugly faces.

PRNG designed by NSA was easy to predict if you know a secret
(discrete logarithm) almost surely known by the NSA.

Back in my late teens I reversed a poker machine, mainly the PRNG.
It was on a 8 bit 6502 compatible CPU. Reversing went well, until I
decided that the PRNG heavily depended on the real money balance, not
drawing the cards "honestly". I stopped because this observation
contradicted my business plan.

 


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