News posts seem to be broken, this is a resent: ----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Newsgroups: php.cvs Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2001 12:03 AM Subject: Re: [PHP-CVS] cvs: php4 /ext/standard rand_mt.c rand_sys.c > > "Andrei Zmievski" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message > news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]... > > On Wed, 05 Sep 2001, Jeroen van Wolffelaar wrote: > > > Just look at the algorithm and you'll see at once it is bogus. Only in > the > > > special case that one single key is requested it is correct. > > > Proving it's bogus is trivial, so I'll leave that as an exercise to the > > > reader (I'm serious). > > There are about 2**31 possibilities for randval. So already when picking 13 > elements out of an array, (which can be done in 13! ways), some > possibilities are not even possible! > > Furthermore, it makes simply no sense, just look at the key point, every > time r/R, where r and R decrease... that has a really high preference for > 'neat' distributions. > > --Jeroen > > > > > A little less patronizing, please. > > I'm very sorry, but this again is an example of simply test things out > without reasoning/thinking/proving. Which is IMO very bad. > If you simply think about the algorithm, I'm sure you would have seen > immediately what was wrong. I must say I didn't do any testing at all with > that function, but that's not necessary! > > -- PHP Development Mailing List <http://www.php.net/> To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To contact the list administrators, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
