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Feedback on random numbers item
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Feedback on random numbers item
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thedoc
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Feedback on random numbers item
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19/05/2013 16:30:01 »
Vincent van der Vlis asked the Naked Scientists:
Just heard the question about random numbers on Redi Tlhabi's talk show on 702/Cape Talk via Podcast.
I have been a software engineer for the last 30 years and we use random numbers quite a bit for generating test data. When testing software it is a good idea to use sufficiently random inputs so that you can cover the most computational paths in the software algorithm.
Computer software alone can only generate pseudorandom numbers. They are pseudo because given the same set of inputs on two different computers, the exact "random" sequence can be generated. As time is usually one of these inputs (i.e. seed or starting point), these sequesces appear to be random. Use is somtimes made of an external hardware device to generate these random numbers, they measue some physical property (such as the noise in a transistor) to generate a "true" random number.
However, this has proved to be difficult and many of these devices fail the statistical test for randomness. Nature it appears is not that random after all! There is a great write up on this topic on Wikipedia, have a look at this page:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_number_generation
.
What do you think?
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Last Edit: 19/05/2013 16:30:01 by _system
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