Talk:Random number generator
Explaining edit for simplification and "advanced" page
Just to explain this edit I made, and why I created Random number generator/Linear feedback shift register (advanced). When I made this example, my goal was to make the simplest working PRNG of reasonable quality. Easy to read and understand, and good enough for practical use. It's also very simple to modify once you understand it (but not before!).
We could discuss various potential tricks, optimizations and other properties of the implementation for days and days (and we literally have, if you read the forum threads), but it's detrimental to the goal of it being a simple, clear, ready-to-use example. I was already on the fence about having an explanation of the iteration counter, but when tepples doubled its description I realized this was a mistake to include, which is why I removed it entirely.
Instead I've created the advanced LFSR page where you can feel free to annotate and ad nauseam. I think this covers the information that tepples was trying to add, as well as a number of other things I intentionally left out (like what it would look like as a 24 or 32 bit LFSR). I hope this is an acceptable solution. What I really don't want to see is a hundred tiny edits slowly overcomplicating the example. Sure, maybe it's what real production code tends to look like after it's been worked on for a long time by many people, but it isn't a good thing to learn from. - Rainwarrior (talk) 15:12, 11 July 2016 (MDT)
