The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Quasirandom Sequences (2018)

http://extremelearning.com.au/unreasonable-effectiveness-of-quasirandom-sequences/

by lnyan • 4 years ago

27 6 4 years ago

extremelearning.com.au

krnsll• 4 years ago

Previous discussion from 2018:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17873284

curiousgal3• 4 years ago

These remind me of an interview where the interviewer asked if I was familiar with pseudo-random generators, I told him well there isn't technically a way to generate a truly random numbers so all of the algorithms people use are PRNGs (MT, PCG, etc.). He seemed confused and disregarded my answer and then went on to describe how the Sobol sequence worked. That's when it clicked for me so I went "Ah you mean Quasi-random!" And he was like "Quasi, Pseudo it's the same, these sequences are not truly random"...

actually_a_dog• 4 years ago

Oh boy. Were you offered, and did you take the job? It's always so disheartening to see such ignorance coming from an interviewer, isn't it?

gnulinux• 4 years ago

Ok let's be charitable here. Being confused by terminology is definitely not unheard-of. I don't know how well established these terms are, but it is true that in some fields "quasi" used in some way similar to "pseudo" or "lesser". If the interviewer previously studied these as PRNG instead of QRNG, I doubt that means they're "ignorant".

curiousgal3• 4 years ago

I was given an offer but I passed on. The entire experience was awful. The other interviewers did not bother to turn their webcams on (nor did they even bother to give an excuse for not doing so). The whole thing felt like an interrogation.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Quasirandom Sequences (2018)

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