[Python-ideas] Should our default random number generator be secure?

[Greg Ewing]

random832 at fastmail.us wrote:
> Being able to produce multiple independent streams of numbers is the
> important feature. Doing it by "jumping ahead" seems less so.

Doing it by jumping ahead isn't strictly necessary; the
important thing is to have some way of generating
*provably* non-overlapping and independent sequences.
Jumping ahead is one obvious way to achieve that.
Simply setting the seed of each generator randomly
and hoping for the best is not really good enough.

 > And the
> need for doing it "efficiently" isn't as clear either

I say that because you can obviously jump ahead N
steps in any generator just by running it for N
cycles, but that's likely to be unacceptably slow.
A more direct way of getting there is desirable.

-- 
Greg