[Python-Dev] a note in random.shuffle.doc ... (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Sun Jun 11 02:35:04 CEST 2006

Tim Peters wrote:

Off the top of my head, then, since the Twister is provably equidistributed in 623 dimensions to 32-bit accuracy, I expect it should be able to "fairly" generate all permutations of a sequence of <= 623 elements (equidistribution in N dimensions implies equidistribution in all dimensions <= N). So I'm happy to leave a warning out until the casinos switch to 12-deck blackjack ;-)

But isn't the problem with the Twister that for some initial states the period could be much shorter than the theoretical maximum?

Or is the probability of getting such an initial state too small to worry about?

-- Greg

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list