On Friday, 26 February 2016 at 19:35:38 UTC, Joseph Rushton
Wakeling wrote:
On Thursday, 25 February 2016 at 17:27:25 UTC, Andrei
Alexandrescu wrote:
This could be fixed by devising a PRNG that takes a given
period n and generates all numbers in [0, n) in exactly n
steps.
On reflection, I have a nasty feeling there's a fundamental
problem with this proposed approach.
It's this: if you're relying on the PRNG having a period of n
in which it covers exactly once each of the numbers from [0,
n), then you're essentially outsourcing the random aspect of
the permutation to the _seeding_ of this generator.
Now, what would be an appropriate seed-generation-mechanism to
guarantee that this PRNG can select from all possible
permutations with uniform probability?
This was what I was trying to get at in my initial post, but I
failed to get the idea across properly.
