Looking for a clear and concise web page explaining why lower bits of random numbers are usually not

Posted by Hamish Grubijan on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Hamish Grubijan
Published on 2010-04-01T14:15:18Z Indexed on 2010/04/23 16:13 UTC
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random-number-generator

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bits

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gotchas

I am putting together an internal "every developer should know" wiki page.

I saw many discussions regarding rand() % N, but not a single web page that explains it all.

For instance, I am curious if this problem is only C- and Linux-specific, or if it also applies to Windows, C++,. Java, .Net, Python, Perl.

Please help me get to the bottom of this. Also, just how non-random do the numbers get? Thank you!

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