Talk:Diehard tests

I've based this largely on the descriptions in Marsaglia's C code, which I don't understand too well. I would be obliged if some statistician would rewrite the descriptions more accurately. Tualha 4 July 2005 12:22 (UTC)

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"Collectively they are considered one of the most stringent such tests known". This is sadly no longer true. They are good tests and still worth doing, but there are tougher ones available now. The main problem is that Diehard tests only about 11megabytes of data. As some modern applications use as much as several terabytes of random data, Diehard might not be able to detect large-scale patterns that are important to some people. Just off the top of my head, more stringent tests include NIST, SPRNG, L'Ecuyer, gjrand, and probably heaps of others. This is not supposed to belittle Marsaglia. Diehard is a big improvement on what was easily available before, and the newer tougher tests are all to some extent inspired by Diehard. 203.164.223.250 01:42, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Dead link?

The original link seems to be dead. The mirror link works just fine, though.

Expected Results

Would if be beneficial to add a brief example of an expected or typical test result for a random number generation program for each test? Is such data available? JackStonePGD (talk) 17:33, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

In my view, no. The result of running the test will typically be "Pass", or something like "Fail on tests 2, 3, and 7". Maproom (talk) 06:43, 8 August 2015 (UTC)

Intentional pun?

Diehard is a battery... of tests. Is this an intentional pun referencing the Diehard brand of car batteries? Either way, I think it's amusing. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.187.112.10 (talk) 21:35, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

"A certain distribution"

What is the distribution of occurrences that this vague and deliberately uninformative statement is made? 50.35.97.238 (talk) 20:04, 16 December 2018 (UTC)