How and Why Computers Roll Loaded Dice - Researchers are one step closer to injecting probability into deterministic machines.

submitted by magnora7 from quantamagazine.org

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newinsightfulfun

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

"Closer to injecting probability into deterministic machines"? That sounded like nonsense to me at first, and I thought the authors were just clueless about RNGs. It's not a new or really that unsolved of a problem, fundamentally. But I read the paper, and it explains the problem a lot better:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.03830.pdf

Besides, if it was a problem Donald Knuth has cared about, it can't be nonsense.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

It’s totally not about what the title or the article itself imply.

And the authors spell it out for them in the abstract.

generating a ran- dom integer from a discrete probability dis- tribution using a source of independent and unbiased random coin flips.

They are rambling about PRNGs the whole time when this is not about PRNGs at all.