LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Pseudorandom Number Generator: Sequences
built 811 days ago
[One] item of interest, although the sequence it generates is not cryptosecure, is a pseudorandom number generator that has generated a great deal of excitement in the scientific world, the Mersenne Twister. It is essentially a large linear-feedback shift register, and ... its output has the same general weaknesses from the viewpoint of cryptosecurity; however, the output has excellent statistical properties, and given that and its long period, it is useful as a basic component within a stream cipher.
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Other pseudorandom-number generators are ... widely used, including some that have serious flaws, says David Wagner, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. For example, many computers come equipped with a random-number generator that alternates between odd and even numbers. A truly random sequence would never have such a regular structure.
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The NIST Statistical Test Suite is a package of 16 tests that were developed to test the randomness of (arbitrarily long) binary sequences produced by random or pseudorandom number generators. The tests focus on a variety of different types of non-randomness that could exist in a sequence.
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The following data set contains three sequences of 0s and 1s as generated by the pseudorandom number generators in each of three leading software packages. Test each for randomness using a 5% cutoff and summarize your results.
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