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In article <47EBA03D.9427DF0A@xxxxxxxx> Morris Dovey <mrdovey@xxxxxxxx> writes:
...
> I got to thinking about how one might go about using the pi and e
> digit strings to build a random number generator. Seemed like a
> good idea at the time. :-)
>
> Then I wrote a tiny program to give me the digit frequencies and
> decided that the idea might not be as good as I'd thought it
> might be. With a initialized to 10000 and the printf() format
> changed to "%.3ld" to produce the digits, I ran my little counter
> program to get:
...
> Which surprised me because I'd expected a much more even
> distribution.
You would have gotten that with the format string "%.4d". On the other
hand, using pi and e for random digits only works when they are normal
to base 10 (and there must be some additional randomness in the digits).
It is unknown whether they are.
--
dik t. winter, cwi, kruislaan 413, 1098 sj amsterdam, nederland, +31205924131
home: bovenover 215, 1025 jn amsterdam, nederland; http://www.cwi.nl/~dik/
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