[New-bugs-announce] [issue12754] Add alternative random number generators

[Raymond Hettinger]

New submission from Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettinger at gmail.com>:

While keeping the MT generator as the default, add new alternative random number generators as drop-in replacements.  Since MT was first introduced, PRNG technology has continued to advance.

I'm opening this feature request to be a centralized place to discuss which alternatives should be offered.

Since we already have a mostly-good-enough(tm) prng, any new generators need to be of top quality, be well researched, and offer significantly different performance characteristics than we have now (i.e. speed, cryptographic strength, simplicity, smaller state vectors, etc).

At least one of the new generators should be cryptographically strong (both to the left and to the right) while keeping reasonable speed for simulation, sampling, and gaming apps.  (The speed requirement precludes the likes of Blum Blum Shub for example.)  I believe there are several good candidates based on stream ciphers or that use block ciphers in a feedback mode.

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assignee: rhettinger
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 142151
nosy: rhettinger
priority: low
severity: normal
status: open
title: Add alternative random number generators
type: feature request
versions: Python 3.3

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue12754>
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