Re: Library_submissions and Call for Maintainers

i'd be interested in at least being a comaintainer of random. A lot of work i'm doing lately depends on having high quality + performant RNGs in haskell. (i do think its a sufficiently subtle domain that 2 heads are better than one for steering the course mind you) On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 1:26 AM, Edward Kmett wrote:

I'm not wedded to either approach on splitting. I'm mostly concerned that we have someone who is at least giving these topics consideration.

-Edward

On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 12:26 AM, Gershom B wrote:

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* random

We've had some truly excellent work done over the last couple of years on how to deal with "splitting" a random number generator in a cryptographically sound manner. I spent some time cleaning up a few outstanding issues for this package personally over the summer, but have not had nearly enough time to devote to the issue of how to integrate

On February 28, 2015 at 11:39:48 PM, Edward Kmett (ekmett@gmail.com) wrote: the

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outcome of the recent research on splitting, while simultaneously caring about performance and soundness.

With regards to random, rather than making System.Random crypographically sound (which, as I understand it, could require changes to the API), there is a “halfway house” approach — implementation of the SplitMix algorithm of Steele, Lea and Flood [1]. This algorithm, now included in Java JDK8, claims that it is a "version of the purely functional API used in the Haskell library for over a decade, but SplitMix is faster and produces pseudorandom sequences of higher quality.”

I am not volunteering to work on such a project, but it seems like it could not only be worthwhile, but quite a bit of fun for somebody with the right inclination.

[1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2660195&CFID=630640078&CFTOKEN=34009864

Cheers, Gershom

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