Message218291
> What constitutes "enough" is a value judgment that many vary from
> application to application. For some applications, a much weaker PRNG
> would suffice, but we decided long ago that we wanted the full power of MT.
I don't really understand for which application 20000 bits of seeding entropy would be required *in practice*. Surely MT has other interesting properties (such as the statistical distribution of the output) than its insanely large cycle length, that make it desirable as a PRNG.
The paper you linked to ("Good Practice in (Pseudo) Random Number Generation for Bioinformatics Applications") doesn't suggest feeding a 20000 bits seed, it actually seems to say that 64 bits is enough for numerical simulations run on large clusters.
While reading 20000 bits off of /dev/urandom might be fast under Linux, it might not necessarily be the case on other systems. It doesn't sound reasonable to read this many data if there isn't a strong reason for doing it. |
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2014-05-11 19:51:58 | pitrou | set | recipients:
+ pitrou, tim.peters, rhettinger, mark.dickinson, vstinner, ezio.melotti, Arfrever, alex, neologix, dstufft |
2014-05-11 19:51:58 | pitrou | set | messageid: <1399837918.55.0.550569119819.issue21470@psf.upfronthosting.co.za> |
2014-05-11 19:51:58 | pitrou | link | issue21470 messages |
2014-05-11 19:51:57 | pitrou | create | |
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