Rule 30 RNG

Today we get away from the word games for a little while and get back to talking about random number generators (previous posts here and here). Or rather one random number generator in specific: a Rule 30 psuedo-random number generator (PRNG). (Here’s the motivating post from Programming Praxis.)

Remember the previous post I made about cellular automaton? The basic idea is to turn those into a random number generator. If you go back to the linked post in particular and give it Rule 30 with a random initial state, you can see how chaotic the rows seem to be. Perfect for a PRNG.

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