[Randtest-develop] randtest 1.0

[Mike R. <er...@es...>]

Howdy folks,

Happy New Year y'all :-)  

I've pushed the longest runs test has far and as hard as I can.  I'm now
going to give up.  It seems that there's no shortcuts that work, and brute
force computing the chi^2 tables can take a *very* long time, even on 1GHz
computers.  

However, for block sizes less than 500 bits, the calculations are exact
and can be found in less than 1 hour.  For 10000 bit blocks, computing m=1
or m=2 is *really* long, and even for m=6 or m=8 it's going to take a
while using brute force.

The "bigfloat" package was expaned to include polynomial manipulation so I
could add the natural logarithm via Tchebyshev expansions.  This was just
cut and paste from other stuff, but this is a good excuse to get it out to
the public domain.

If anyone wants to take charge of the randtest project, I'll be very happy
to turn over the passwords.  The major things that need to be done are to 
mesh the hex input and FIPS tests so that hex input can feed the NIST
tests (which now only work with binary data) and FIPS tests can work with
binary data.

More tests can also be added.  The general idea is that there's no cabal
of high priests that dictate what blocksizes or probabilities get used.
Everything should be computed from basic principles so the users know the
right answer is really coming out (but it all still needs lots of testing
to prove that :-)

It's kind of cool that problems from the 1800's still can't be computed
in "reasonable" time even with 1 GHz processors.  But I'm heading for
physics problems from the 1910's, so I leave randtest in the state it's
in.  I hope it will be a small core of what comes next.

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike