About polynomial-time “unpredictable” generators

So-called "perfect" or "unpredictable" pseudorandom generators have been proposed recently by people from the area of cryptology. Many people got aware of them from an optimistic article in the New York Times (Gleick (1988)). These generators are usually based on nonlinear recurrences modulo some integer m. Under some (yet unproven) complexity assumptions, it has been proven that no polynomial-time statistical test can distinguish a sequence of bits produced by such a generator from a sequence of truly random bits.In this paper, we give some theoretical background concerning this class of generators and we look at the practicality of using them for simulation applications. We examine in particular their ease of implementation, their efficiency, periodicity, the ease of jumping ahead in the sequence, the minimum size of modulus that should be used, etc.

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