[3188] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Strong PRNG with AES or 3-DES
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perry E. Metzger)
Tue Aug 11 10:54:23 1998
To: Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.shen@stud.uni-muenchen.de>
cc: Mark Tillotson <markt@harlequin.co.uk>, mdw@umich.edu, aes@suburbia.net,
coderpunks@toad.com, cryptography@c2.net
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 11 Aug 1998 09:48:45 BST."
<35CFF75D.C5CECAA0@stud.uni-muenchen.de>
Reply-To: perry@piermont.com
Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 10:40:34 -0400
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Mok-Kong Shen writes:
> Mark Tillotson wrote:
> In general computing I suppose it is well-known that one can obtain
> any statistical distribution (discrete or not) from a uniform
> distribution in [0,1).
I suppose it is not well known that the floating point numbers between
0 and 1 do not constitute a uniform distribution over the space [0,1),
and that, in fact, the distribution has very bad properties. See any
book on numerical analysis for a discussion of this.
You are not, remember, dealing with reals. You are dealing with a bad
approximation, "floating point" numbers.
Perry
