Quite a while ago, I presented a fast exponentiation algorithm that uses the binary decomposition of the exponent 
While discussing this algorithm in class, a student asked a very interesting question: what’s special about base 2? Couldn’t we use another base? Well, yes, yes we can.
2 Comments | 
algorithms, Mathematics | Tagged: base 2, binary, fast exponentiation, Mathematica, number theory | 
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Posted by Steven Pigeon
Last week (at the time of writing, anyway), Ars Technica reported a serious bug in AMD’s implementation of rdrand, an instruction that helps you generate random numbers. Apparently, on (some) Ryzen 3000, 0xfff…ff is “random”.
I recently got an AMD Ryzen 9 3900x, and I wondered if I have the bug as well.
Leave a Comment » | assembly language, hacks, Instruction Sets | Tagged: 3900X, AMD, bug, hardware random generator, random, Ryzen | Permalink
Posted by Steven Pigeon
Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger 