A Family of Controllable Cellular Automata for Pseudorandom Number Generation

Abstract

In this paper, we present a family of novel Pseudorandom Number Generators (PRNGs) based on Controllable Cellular Automata (CCA) ─ CCA0, CCA1, CCA2 (NCA), CCA3 (BCA), CCA4 (asymmetric NCA), CCA5, CCA6 and CCA7 PRNGs. The ENT and DIEHARD test suites are used to evaluate the randomness of these CCA PRNGs. The results show that their randomness is better than that of conventional CA and PCA PRNGs while they do not lose the structure simplicity of 1-d CA. Moreover, their randomness can be comparable to that of 2-d CA PRNGs. Furthermore, we integrate six different types of CCA PRNGs to form CCA PRNG groups to see if the randomness quality of such groups could exceed that of any individual CCA PRNG. Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to evolve the configuration of the CCA PRNG groups. Randomness test results on the evolved CCA PRNG groups show that the randomness of the evolved groups is further improved compared with any individual CCA PRNG.