On Fri, 26 Jul 2002 09:56:45 +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
While Mr. Hruska is wrong, so are you:
>I can't see any difference. Computers are deterministic beasts. If you have
>the initial stage you can predict any stage later and it doesn't matter
>whether it's a static PRNG's internal state or state of a polymorphic
>algorithm. The point is the seeding. In general PRNGs use some pseudo
>random (but highly unpredictabel) sources (see RFC 1750) to generate an
>initial state then they iterate this state to get secure random numbers.
>In other words with one seeding you can have many (pseudo) random value.
Theoretical computers may be deterministic beasts, but real world computers
are not. There are any number of things a real world computer can do with
results that are not deterministic. A trivial example -- grab the instruction
cycle counter, ping a host over a WAN, grab the instruction cycle counter.
This is truly unpredictable because the quartz oscillators involved drift due
to microscopic zone temperature variations. (Though these are macro effects,
not quantum.)
DS
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