[TUHS] early unix rand
Previous message (by thread): [TUHS] early unix rand Next message (by thread): [TUHS] early unix rand Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] i wrote the generator. dmr or rhm wrote the comment. it came about after one of the first drafts of a graphical pool game. the balls were points and the test was the bouncing off the edge of the pool table. the balls were placed at "random" places on the table, they were started with "random" directions and "random" velocities. frictionless it ran forever. after many minutes, from a mess of dots, they form a line, later a couple lines, later several points, and finally after a large fraction of an hour, all the balls would converge on a single dot. that version of the program was saved with the name "wierd" (spelling on purpose). i have no idea if it exists now. On Tue, Mar 12, 2024 at 7:38 AM Douglas McIlroy < douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu> wrote: > > The author of this routine has been writing > > random-number generators for many years and has > > never been known to write one that worked. > > It sounds like Ken to me. Although everybody had his > own favorite congruential random number generator, > some worse than others, I believe it was Ken who put > one in the math library. > > The very fact that rand existed, regardless of its quality, > enabled a lovely exploit. When Ken pioneered password > cracking by trying every word in word lists at hand, one > of the password files he found plenty of hits in came from > Berkeley. He told them and they responded by assigning > random passwords to everybody. That was a memorable > error. Guessing that the passwords were generated by > a simple encoding of the output of rand, Ken promptly > broke 100% of the newly "hardened" password file. > > Doug > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20240312/ae350bc0/attachment.htm>
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