Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Sin

Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin. John von Neumann

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think von Neumann was being a little extreme there, psudorandom numbers are immensely useful, as long as you're generator is a good one. If you're doing cryptography on the other hand, he is entirely correct (though you don't need much entropy to get a good random stream)