Howdy,
On Fri, Apr 27, 2001 at 04:40:15PM +0100, kevin lyda wrote:
> how can i analyse a stream of numbers to see how random they are?
> does anyone have any web pages that discuss this? i napped too much
> in stats - a bad course to take in the spring, even in buffalo it got
> too hot for stats around april...
>> i'm looking to compare the numbers returned from egd to the ones returned
> from /dev/random on linux (and maybe openbsd if i'm bored).
One metric might be compressibility... Given a suitably large (!)
number of suitably large streams of bits, compress with {gzip,bzip2}.
Discuss.
A little voice in the back of my head is shouting `unicity distance'
at me. Shannon's paper on redundancy in messages might be relevant (or
at least related) here...
http://www3.edgenet.net/dcowley/docs.html
ATB,
Wesley.
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