Yeah, I'm still concerned about crystalline entities suddenly showing up. Have they ever fixed it? I don't see anything in the issue tracker, probably because no one was left last time to report it...
I would expect all RNG algorithms to be deterministic and stable with their seed,
but the cryptographically secure ones to have some additional properties like making it unfeasible to reverse the seed from the output, having a very long period or strong guarantees on the distribution of the output.
It's just that using a 'secure' algorithm is often overkill for a game when you don't really need those extra guarantees.
> It's just that using a 'secure' algorithm is often overkill for a game when you don't really need those extra guarantees.
It's not overkill here, because this is a turn-based game. The additional cost of using high-quality randomness instead of World's Worst "Randomness" will never even be noticed; I would have expected a CSPRNG to be the default approach.
That said, it is true that while the C# standard library provides a CSPRNG alongside its terrible PRNG, it won't let you seed the CSPRNG. So even if you know what the right thing to do is, Microsoft doesn't want you to do it.
It feels a bit unfair to say that it is faster by being able to tell the total length from the first byte and capping it at 64 bit, while some of the other formats can store arbitrarily large integers.
I guess you could use another variable length encoding for the prefix at the cost of some performance and using even more space...
Eh... unfortunately they shut down their forums a couple of years ago. So good luck getting any form of support as a free user even if you run into real bugs in their software (believe me, I tried...)
That being said, I have used their ice40 and ECP5 FPGAs with Yosys for a couple of small projects and that worked perfectly fine.
And Hamamatsu (and some others) still produce and sell photomultiplier tubes.
The microchannel plate PMTs are pretty nifty things [1]. You can get single-digit picosecond time resolution out of them.
[1]: https://www.hamamatsu.com/us/en/product/optical-sensors/pmt/...
Clearly, we should place a radioactive source, a Geiger counter, and a computer in a sealed box. Every time the counter registers a decay, the computer performs a HTTP GET. Thus, we end up with Schrödinger's webserver...
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