unpredictableSeed

[Rob T]

On Monday, 4 March 2013 at 11:04:46 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling 
wrote:
> On 03/04/2013 09:58 AM, Andrea Fontana wrote:
>> Maybe you can try to connect an external hardware device (e.g. 
>> arduino) and read
>> some params from real world... :)
>
> Yes, there are nice options here ... :-)
>
> However, to re-focus the discussion -- I'm not so much asking 
> "How do I ensure my own code is statistically safe?", as there 
> are lots of ways I can go about that.  I'm concerned with the 
> theoretical and practical justification for Phobos' existing 
> unpredictableSeed, and possible superior alternatives that 
> could reasonably be implemented _for Phobos_.

I found this which seems to be what Phobos duplicates
http://www.cryptosys.net/rng_algorithms_old.html

The theory appears to be no more than an ad-hoc attempt to find 
something unique and hard to predict across threads, processes 
and machines.

The superseded and improved version uses a hash of more 
potentially unique values
http://www.cryptosys.net/rng_algorithms.html

Clearly we're lacking a real solution, and IMO the solution 
should be hardware devices that come with standardized random 
generators.

--rt