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topaz0 | 10 days ago

We're talking about randomizing experiment participants into treatment and control group... What you're saying is equivalent to "I can use the same order of assignments for every experiment I do"...

discuss

order

fc417fc802|10 days ago

I thought we were speaking more generally. In the specific case of assigning experimental subjects to groups at the time the experiment is performed you'd want a "no tricks up my sleeve" number for the key such as a hash of the date string in ISO standard format (ie yyyy-mm-dd). Your RNG is then AES_ECB( key=sha3(date_string), plaintext=serial_number ) using the serial number of the participant.

If you need to use a rejection method to achieve a uniform distribution you can do so via plaintext=( ( serial_number << 32 ) | sample_counter ).

By adhering to such a scheme it becomes extremely difficult for anyone to reasonably accuse you of underhanded tricks via RNG manipulation.