From: Paul Sanchez <paul@...>
Date: 2004-05-22T01:23:47+09:00
Subject: [OT] Re: ISAAC Random Number Generator

ts wrote:
>>>>>>"P" == Paul Sanchez <paul@NOargelSPAMfraster.org> writes:
> 
> 
> P> How does ISAAC hold up under Marsaglia's "Die-Hard" test suite?  I 
> P> believe Ruby is currently providing an implementation of the Mersenne 
> P> Twister, which has aced the Die-Hard tests and has a cycle length on the 
> P> order of 10^600, so I don't see a compelling reason to go with something 
> P> else in terms of the quality of the random numbers.
> 
>  ISAAC was designed to be cryptographic secure, this is not the case for
>  Mersenne Twister, which is more appropriate for Monte Carlo.

Thanks for the clarification.  Now you've got me curious - what makes a 
generator cryptographically secure, as opposed to being statistically 
indistinguishable from true randomness (which is what you want for Monte 
Carlo)?

--paul