[Tutor] How trustworthy are pseudo-random numbers?

[Luke Paireepinart]

Is your math correct?  That's ridiculously large.

On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 10:03 AM, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 4:11 PM, Daniele <d.conca at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >From here
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_generator#Periodicity
>> and here
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_twister#Advantages
>>
>> I think it can be argued that the randomness is pretty trustworthy :o)
>
> Nice understatement on that last page - "most applications do not
> require 2^19937 unique combinations (2^19937 is approximately 4.315425
> × 10^6001)."
>
> If you used every atom in the known universe as a computer, then let
> them turn out a billion combinations a second for the entire time
> since the big bang, and call the number of combination you get then
> N...
> then take N computers turning out N combinations a second for the
> entire time since the big bang, and call the number of combinations
> they turn out N2...
> then take N2 computers turning out N2 combinations a second and call
> the number of combination they turn out in the time since the big bang
> and call that N3...
> then the number of combinations turned out by N3 computers turning out
> N3 combinations per second in the time since the big bang STILL
> dwarves in comparison to that number.
>
>
> --
> André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
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