[VA] SRC #011 - April 1st, 2022 Bizarro Special

[EdS2]

A marvellous and remarkable feat, Valentin - well done, and thank you for sharing your approach, and your other approach.

The double pseudo-random number generator is very nice indeed. I would never have guessed there'd be room to generate (and use) six random numbers.

Thanks also Albert for your subsequent workings. It's particularly nice to see your arc-SOHCAHTOA method in use, and so soon after posting.

It feels to me that uniform sampling would be just as accurate as random sampling, although as it turns out it would more expensive in terms of machinery. Because in this presentation we're allowed first to decide how many steps to run, a uniform approach is natural. A random sampling approach has the great advantage that it can keep running and continue to make progress, without needing to complete some particular number of steps.

But, it seems to me that there might be an interesting way to use uniform sampling with an unbounded count, using some sort of space-filling reordering of the numbers in the interval. Perhaps a simple bitwise operation, if implementing on a 16C or a conventional machine.

In the past I've used(*) int(x+phi) as an iterator, as a way to 'fill space' in a deterministic way. It's not uniform. And it's very much not random. But it is perhaps approximately as pseudo-random as the R-D approach seen here... and simpler conventionally, but less simple in a world where we have an R-D function!

(*) oops, I meant frac(x+phi) of course!