| > Ideally, of course! This is a really high standard that I'm afraid isn't enforced in a lot of commercial or even sensitive applications. 86 million permutations is probably good enough and even if someone was clever enough to synch clocks and narrow to 200k permutations, then I'm not convinced there was actually any harm. Of course not, this is ridiculous. If your job is to shuffle the deck, shuffle it well. It's like doing a 80/20 coinflip and arguing that 50/50 is a "really high standard". And that for a company that sells bet-money-on-coinflips software. If you don't know how to do it well -- read a book or use std::random_shuffle. Somehow Stepanov was able to do it right (assuming a good RandomNumberGenerator input) from the first try in 1993, without Wikipedia poor guy. And this wasn't even his main job, random_shuffle was one of a dozens of algorithms he envisioned and implemented for the STL. > This is circular as you're taking the article's narrative at face value without getting any primary sources confirming gross negligence or "arrogance" as you imply. I did some quick research and it seems that ASF Software had indeed developed the Planet Poker online platform. Which comes down to failing at your main job, I don't really see what other evidence you expect here? I strongly believe that people in general and software engineers in particular should be held up to high standards. Finding excuses for how school-level math is too hard for them is condescending. It is disrespectful to the very people you're talking about. If you say they couldn't even understand that N^N is not divisible by N! you basically say that they're mentally challenged. I on the contrary say that they most certainly would've been able to understand it if they made an effort -- which they didn't. So negligence. |