I understand that Julia produces PRNs. (Pseudo Random Numbers). The website ( www.random.org ) advertises itself as producing true random numbers. I can understand that for testing purposes PRNs may be desired, but once testing is completed, wouldn’t it be preferred to have true random numbers? Mig…

Yes, pseudo by default (see below for non-default true random with Julia). Truly random is in vast majority of cases not needed (I recall one case, a paper claiming truly random from a quantum process better for machine learning… I wasn’t believing it). If you want to do a quantum suicide then Juli…

[image] neophytedave: I can understand that for testing purposes PRNs may be desired, but once testing is completed, wouldn’t it be preferred to have true random numbers? No. Generating true randomness is rarely necessary, but requires dedicated hardware. In any case, it’s not something you’d…

[image] Palli: Julia’s rand is NOT ok for cryptography, but Julia’s stdlib allows for that, if I recall, it’s just non-default, and it accesses (on Linux), if I recall: julia> using Random help?> Random.RandomDevice RandomDevice() Create a RandomDevice RNG object. Two such objects will…

As for why Julia (or all programming languages I know) don’t give “true” random numbers by default: PRNs are awesome for reproducibility: you just need to record the seed, then you can reproduce the stream of random numbers. “True” random numbers are expensive. The numbers produced by /dev/random …

In general, for scientific purposes true randomness is not needed. It’s sufficient that pseudorandom generators produce numbers which are independent of any process one models in the program. Most newer pseudorandom generators are ok, with some exceptions when it comes to parallel processing. The b…

[image] Elrod: If you’re doing Monte Carlo, you’ll want PRNGs; so long as you don’t have overlapping streams between threads, being pseudo-random won’t impact accuracy, while their better speed will improve accuracy/second (i.e., can sample more in the same amount of time, or sample for less tim…

[image] sijo: “True” random numbers are expensive. The numbers produced by /dev/random consume entropy that’s gathered from the system We believe that, for practical purposes, P != NP and that CSPRNGs exist. On modern systems, /dev/random and /dev/urandom both access the same random numbers …

[image] foobar_lv2: The virtual machine might get suspended. And then it might get woken up, from the same state, twice. Can’t you just read the clock occasionally and mix into PRNG state? If the clocks in the virtual machine are messed up, then indeed you are in a malicious case, and then so…

[image] foobar_lv2: On modern systems, /dev/random and /dev/urandom both access the same random numbers and don’t consume entropy. You don’t consume entropy because entropy is only used to seed a CSPRNG. I guess that’s a very recent development? In 2020 at least the Linux /dev/random was stil…

I stand completely informed regarding Julia and RNG.

True random numbers

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True random numbers

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