Re: depleting the random number generator

[Bill Stewart]

At 03:16 PM 7/21/99 -0500, John Kelsey wrote:
>Suppose God, in a fit of budget-consciouness, decides to get
>rid of all this wasteful hardware for generating random
>numbers that are necessary for quantum mechanics, and
>instead replaces them with a PRNG with a 256-bit seed.  In
>this case, all hardware noise sources are ultimately tapping
>into this same seed and PRNG. How will you, or anyone, tell
>the difference?  (This assumes that God can find some good
>pseudorandom function families, of course.)

God would then, as Von Neumann put it, be living in a state of sin :-)



                                Thanks! 
                                        Bill
Bill Stewart, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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