[ExI] isaac's number

[John Clark]

On Wed, Aug 2, 2017 at 12:04 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

​> ​
> I don’t know John.  I need to learn up on this, figure out how the rand()
> function works in VBA.


​
You got me curious so I looked it up, it's 32 bit pseudorandom
​
generator
​
is called called
​
"MT19937"and is considered pretty good for most uses because it has a super
long period of 2^19937 -1 (a Mersenne
​
prime), even Mathematica and Matlab use it so it must be good but
​ i
t
​
is not
​
good enough for
​
cryptography
​
because after observing just 624 iterations you could theoretically predict
what the next one will be. Some say sending the output of  MT19937
​ ​
​
through even a simple hash function
​will​
 greatly improve it, although of course that would also slow things down.

​John K Clark​
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