RE: Random number access on the i5

I once wrote a program in RPG that would tell you your future. It's been
many many years ago and I was quite bored at the time at the job I had and
it seemed like a good thing to do at the time. :-)

It was a magic-8 ball kind of program and had a bunch of canned responses.
When the user hit the enter key, I flashed a bunch of "stars" (asterisk) all
over the screen randomly and then used the random number to determine what
answer I gave back.

I thought it was a lot of fun, although it didn't have much business value.





At 2/1/08 11:35 AM, you wrote:

I have a question regarding random numbers.

I have been doing business programming for 30+ years. I have never needed

a

random number and simply don't have any idea why one would need such a
thing.

Somebody enlighten me. :)

--
Jeff Crosby
UniPro FoodService/Dilgard
P.O. Box 13369
Ft. Wayne, IN 46868-3369
260-422-7531

The opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily the opinion of my
company. Unless I say so.

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Buck
Sent: Friday, February 01, 2008 11:30 AM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Random number access on the i5

Mark Villa wrote:

Is there such a thing as a "certified random number"? I

would like to

get this behind me and I have not found a methodology I can

sign off

on yet. Ideally, any correct algorithm could be multiple

platform. I

am under the impression that it should be CPU dependant and

a CPU must

support it directly with an instruction.

I am partial to Park & Miller rather than the C library
routines, see http://www.firstpr.com.au/dsp/rand31/ A decent
explanation of pseudorandom numbers is in the Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-random_number_generator
Knuth in volume 2 of The Art of Computer Programming has a
long and useful section on randomness.

What do you need the random number to do?
--buck