Theoretical Breakthrough Made In Random Number Generation (threatpost.com)

msm1267 quotes a report from Threatpost: Two University of Texas academics have made what some experts believe is a breakthrough in random number generation that could have longstanding implications for cryptography and computer security. David Zuckerman, a computer science professor, and Eshan Chattopadhyay, a graduate student, published a paper in March that will be presented in June at the Symposium on Theory of Computing. The paper describes how the academics devised a method for the generation of high quality random numbers. The work is theoretical, but Zuckerman said down the road it could lead to a number of practical advances in cryptography, scientific polling, and the study of other complex environments such as the climate. "We show that if you have two low-quality random sources -- lower quality sources are much easier to come by -- two sources that are independent and have no correlations between them, you can combine them in a way to produce a high-quality random number," Zuckerman said. "People have been trying to do this for quite some time. Previous methods required the low-quality sources to be not that low, but more moderately high quality. We improved it dramatically." The technical details are described in the academics' paper "Explicit Two-Source Extractors and Resilient Functions."

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Re:FP

[JanneM]

For large-scale simulations you need them to be pseudo-random, as in repeatable. If you are running a parallel simulation across hundreds or thousands of nodes, you can't send random data to all the nodes. You'd spend all your time sending that, not getting anywhere with your simulation.

Instead, what you do is that each node runs its own random generator, but seeded with the same state. That way they all have the same random source, with no need to flood the interconnect with (literally) random data.

Another reason is repeatability of course. You may often want to run the exact same simulation many times when you're developing and debugging your code.