Re: Testing randomness

Hi,
> I recently released Net::Random to the CPAN.  It retrieves data from
> online sources of truly random data (so they claim).  I'm quite happy to
> believe that those data really are random, but I'm not so happy to
> believe that the results of my module are random, because I do some
> processing of the data to ensure that the user only gets random values
> in a range he has specified.  Any error in my code - off-by-one errors
> for instance - could introduce bias.
> 
> So, how do I test that the data I produce is random?

The NIST had a whole working group on randomness.
And they published their report and a statistical
test suite at
http://csrc.nist.gov/rng/rng2.html

Another famous test is Marsaglia's Diehard:
http://www.stat.fsu.edu/pub/diehard/

Generating randomness is a hard problem, see for example
Peter Gutmann's publications (e.g.
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/usenix98.pdf).

Best regards,

Matthias