isUniformRNG

Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Sun May 4 07:28:14 PDT 2014


On 5/4/2014 3:47 AM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>
> About a more general "isRNG" template: can you be more precise about
> what you are interested in achieving with this?  Generally speaking I
> would find it rather dangerous to go passing around sources of
> randomness without having some understanding of their properties :-)
>

Fair enough point, I'll explain my situation:

On a general level, I'm trying to grok the whole intent of isUniformRNG 
and see whether or not anything else may ever be needed in addition to 
isUniformRNG. I'm not trying to push an "isRNG", just trying to 
understand std.random's current intentions and reasoning, so I know how 
to work with it appropriately.

But more immediately, since Phobos lacks a crypto-secure RNG, I'm 
implementing NIST's Hash_DRBG (backed by the OS-provided 
RtlGenRandom/CryptGenRandom and "/dev/random" as entropy sources). 
Hopefully I can get it into a Phobos-acceptable state.

Now, I can follow the spec for the Hash_DRBG algorithm well enough, but 
I'm not really solid on random-number theory, so I can't be certain 
whether or not isUniformRNG is appropriate for this. I would assume 
"yes", but I don't want to assume. Hence my inquiries.



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