<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif">On Wed, Aug 2, 2017 at 12:04 PM, spike </span><span dir="ltr" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"><<a href="mailto:spike66@att.net" target="_blank">spike66@att.net</a>></span><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"> wrote:</span><br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><span style="font-size:18.6667px"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">​> ​</div>I don’t know John.  I need to learn up on this, figure out how the rand() function works in VBA. </span></blockquote><div class="gmail_quote"><font size="4"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_quote"><font size="4"><div class="gmail_default" style="display:inline"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">​</font></div>You got me curious so I looked it up, it's 32 bit pseudorandom<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">​ </div>generator<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">​ </div>is called called<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">​ </div>"MT19937"and is considered pretty good for most uses because it has a super long period of 2^19937 -1 (a Mersenne<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">​ </div>prime), even Mathematica and Matlab use it so it must be good but<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">​ i</div>t<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">​ </div>is not<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">​ </div>good enough for<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">​ </div>cryptography<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">​ </div>because after observing just 624 iterations you could theoretically predict what the next one will be. Some say sending the output of  MT19937<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">​ ​</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">​</div>through even a simple hash function <div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">​will​</div> greatly improve it, although of course that would also slow things down.</font></div><div class="gmail_quote"><font size="4"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_quote"><font size="4"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">​John K Clark​</div><br></font></div><div class="gmail_quote"><span style="font-size:18.6667px"><br></span></div><div class="gmail_quote"><span style="font-size:18.6667px"><br></span></div><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div></div></div>