Am 22.06.2011 14:52, schrieb Invisible:
> There are several types of "psuedo-random number generators" out there.
> Most of them work by having some sort of "seed", and a function that
> takes the seed and generates a new random number and a new seed.
>
> This is great if you just want to produce a really long stream of random
> numbers. But are there any PRNGs out there which offer random (!) access
> to the stream of numbers? In other words, the ability to compute the Nth
> random number without needing to compute any of the preceding ones?

(Would that be a Random Access Pseudo-Random Number Generator then? :-))

Depends on what properties you need the PRNs to have.

For instance, if what you really want is to generate a sequence of 
numbers with a low discrepancy distribution (and be able to pick 
individual ones from the sequence), a Halton sequence would be a good 
option.

Then again, if all you want is a value that does not depend on the seed 
in any obvious fashion, you might want to look at some cryptographic 
hashing algorithms.

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