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Post by mhoye but seasonally spooky

Earlier in the thread

mhoye but seasonally spooky @mhoye@cosocial.ca

Maybe 25 years ago now, I remember Don Knuth writing about withdrawing to retool some hashing algorithm he'd been working on, explaining that while all their testing appeared to produce a promisingly uniform randomness, somebody clever had using tried using a linear sequence of integer seeds - 0,1,2,3,4.... that in those conditions the hash showed alarming signs of being very nonrandom, but nobody had thought to test it like that before.

Thinking about that a lot this week. For some reason.

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mhoye but seasonally spooky @mhoye@cosocial.ca

True story: I was once able to help Dr. Knuth with The Art Of Computer Programming, by finding contact information for somebody he owed one of his famous cheques from the Bank Of Sans Seriffe and putting them in contact.

I believe that this is the atomic value of possible contributions to TOACP and computer science as a whole. No smaller or less significant contribution is possible.

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