This is a question about an SO question; I don't think it belongs in meta despite being sp by definition, but if someone feels it should go to math, cross-validated, etc., please let me know.
Background: @ForceBru asked this question about how to generate a 64 bit random number using rand(). @nwellnhof provided an answer that was accepted that basically takes the low 15 bits of 5 random numbers (because MAXRAND is apparently only guaranteed to be 15bits on at least some compilers) and glues them together and then drops the first 11 bits (15*5-64=11). @NikBougalis made a comment that while this seems reasonable, it won't pass many statistical tests of randomnes. @Foon (me) asked for a citation or an example of a test that it would fail. @NikBougalis replied with an answer that didn't elucidate me; @DavidSwartz suggested running it against dieharder.
So, I ran dieharder. I ran it against the algorithm in question
unsigned long long llrand() {
unsigned long long r = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < 5; ++i) {
r = (r << 15) | (rand() & 0x7FFF);
}
return r & 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFULL;
}
For comparison, I also ran it against just rand() and just 8bits of rand() at at time.
void rand_test()
{
int x;
srand(1);
while(1)
{
x = rand();
fwrite(&x,sizeof(x),1,stdout);
}
void rand_byte_test()
{
srand(1);
while(1)
{
x = rand();
c = x % 256;
fwrite(&c,sizeof(c),1,stdout);
}
}
The algorithm under question came back with two tests showing weakenesses for rgb_lagged_sum for ntuple=28 and one of the sts_serials for ntuple=8.
The just using rand() failed horribly on many tests, presumably because I'm taking a number that has 15 bits of randomness and passing it off as 32 bits of randomness.
The using the low 8 bits of rand() at a time came back as weak for rgb_lagged_sum with ntuple 2, and (edit) failed dab_monobit, with tuple 12
My question(s) is:
- Am I interpretting the results for 8 bits of randomly correctly, namely that given that one of the tests (which was marked as "good"; for the record, it also came back as weak for one of the dieharder tests marked "suspect"), came as weak and one as failed, rand()'s randomness should be suspected.
- Am I interpretting the results for the algorithm under test correctly (namely that this should also be marginally suspected)
- Given the description of what the tests that came back as weak do (e.g for sts_serial looks at whether the distribution of bit patterns of a certain size is valid), should I be able to determine what the bias likely is
- If 3, since I'm not, can someone point out what I should be seeing?
Edit: understood that rand() isn't guaranteed to be great. Also, I tried to think what values would be less likely, and surmised zero, maxvalue, or repeated numbers might be... but doing a test of 1000000000 tries, the ratio is very near the expected value of 1 out of every 2^15 times (e.g., in 1000000000 runs, we saw 30512 zeros, 30444 max, and 30301 repeats, and bc says that 30512 * 2^15 is 999817216; other runs had similar ratios including cases where max and/or repeat was larger than zeros.