Why are countries creating public random number generators?

sciencemag.org

4 pointsnewman8r3 comments

Bitcoin block hashes would be a decent source of randomness.

I think you mean "might be".

There's a passage on the subject in Knuth volume 2. Even Knuth needs to test and debug his code, no matter what how good he thought the results "would be". And his conclusion: Use a mathematical foundation for a PRNG, nothing else will do.

Indeed. The passage is from near the beginning of Volume 2 (Chapter 3), where he says how he came up with something that seemed like it should be "super random", tried it, and found that it was not. It ends with:

> The moral of this story is that random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random. Some theory should be used.

and the rest of the chapter proceeds to give some relevant theory.

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