Re:Romu – Fine random number generators
by MarkOverton on Sunday March 01, 2020 @01:16AM
(#22455432)
That's why I pointed out that the probability of a too-short cycle or sequence-overlap is no higher than that of randomly selecting one snowflake out of all snowflakes in Earth's history. Also, the paper has a graph and accompanying discussion of what happens with the shorter cycles.
The probability of the problem occurring is vanishingly small - much smaller than a bit flip due to a cosmic ray in the machine computing it, leading to a wrong answer or a crash. And even that doesn’t matter, because the computations are repeated so often.
Again, the application determines what the most suitable PRNG is.
... for the seeds that were tested.
In theory, you can get unlucky and end up in a short cycle, and it will not pass these tests.
That's why I'm not comfortable with it, when there are generators with a known, guaranteed period. They simply do not have this failure mode.