Which one is random?
(data sets are 100 numbers 1 to 6)
listA=[2,3,5,1,2,2,4,2,4,5,2,3,3,4,5,6,4,2,6,2,2,1,3,4,5,5,6,3,3,6,1,4,2,1,4,5,2,2,3,3,3,5,6,3,2,4,5,5,1,1,1,6,1,4,3,5,5,3,1,1,1,6,1,4,6,6,3,6,6,2,4,4,4,5,1,5,6,2,6,1,1,2,4,2,2,3,4,4,5,6,1,3,3,3,5,4,6,5,1,6]
listB=[4,2,5,6,3,5,3,1,3,4,2,3,4,3,4,5,5,1,3,3,2,1,1,6,1,3,2,2,2,6,1,5,6,3,6,3,2,3,2,4,6,1,1,6,3,2,4,1,6,1,3,1,5,6,2,3,3,5,1,6,4,5,2,5,1,1,5,3,6,2,3,3,6,5,2,3,3,1,6,3,2,3,2,1,6,6,4,4,6,2,4,5,4,5,3,4,6,5,3,2]
@futurebird @Bumblefish Heh, this reminds me of something from school where... Evan? Somebody. made a plot of outputs from the system's (pseudo-)random number generator and turns out there some _very visible_ patterns. Like, obvious visible stripes in the number selection density plot.
@moira @futurebird @Bumblefish RANDU!
That's a blast from the past (already obsolete by the time I started fiddling with computers many years ago).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RANDU
I never used a system with RANDU installed, but I did discover that the PRNGs in old BASICs from the 1980s had the same basic flaw, and I found it in the nerdiest way possible: trying to draw artificial star charts with plausible distributions of star brightnesses, noticing there were some *really funky* patterns in the resulting "constellations", and eventually discovering they had the same mathematical properties that RANDU had (in some cases, worse).
@dpnash @futurebird @Bumblefish omg
that's it
tilted to the right instead of the left
that's what he found :D
@moira @futurebird @Bumblefish
Some months before I found the RNG patterns in the fake star charts (I was around 15 or so), I had the really bright idea of “hey, let’s take the RNG output for a chosen seed as a key stream for a cipher! That’ll be really hard to break, and it’ll only be about 10 lines of code!”
That was the first time I rolled my own crypto, and thanks to serendipitously strange-looking artificial star maps, it was also the last.
@dpnash @futurebird @Bumblefish o noes xD
S'funny, none of us ever got into cryptography, at least not that I remember. Way more interested in getting _finding_ things than _hiding_ things, I think
myrmepropagandist
Solarbird 
David Nash