"Tom Melly" <tom### [at] tomandlucouk> wrote:
>
> True - however the sheer length of the stream would make this unlikely.

Well, I would say, completely impossible things are all around! :-)

In the Knuth's Vol2 I metnioned the author gives a very educative account of
his early experience with designing RGNs. By then, he was young enough :-)
to try to invent the best (no less!) RNG in the world. So he came up with an
utterly sophisticated, if not cryptic, scheme.

Guess what? His RNG repeated itself on step 18! (IIRC; in either case, the
number was around 20...). That taught him... many important things. :-)
Which I hope I have absorbed while reading his excellent books.

BTW, in this respect, Knuth was not alone. One of IBM's RNGs (shipped as
part of FORTRAN libraries for 360's, I believe) appeared to produce series
that, if interpreted as 3D coordinates, would form points all lying on just
several planes in 3D space.

So... :-)

Post a reply to this message