Re:Designing a New PRNG
by jcranmer on Monday December 20, 2021 @03:34PM
(#29629953)
From what I understand of the matter, the crux of it is that there are two modern PRNG families whose creators are running around telling you to use their PRNG over the other's because <technical reasons>, where a) both of them are correct, and b) the <technical reasons> don't elucidate the tradeoffs being made to people whose prior understanding amounts to "I just want a source of random numbers!" This is contrast to something like a linear congruential generator, where the failure mode of the random data is pretty easy to explain.
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I think you misread tptacek's line of questioning. It's not about the quality / superiority of what over what, but the initial motivation for rand switching away from PCG:
> This was done after some concerns were raised by the author of xoshiro, who posted a blog entry on PCG and also raised an issue on the possibility of PCG being invertible.
PCG and the XOR family are both non-cryptographic RNGs, how is predictability or invertibility relevant then? If those are concerns, surely a CSPRNG should be used?
The "quality" of randomness is very much a concern in non-secure contexts e.g. patterns in an RNG can bias your simulation, but it doesn't seem like it'd matter if somebody can recover even your simulation seed.