About the Tests

Frequency (Monobits) Test

Description: The focus of the test is the proportion of zeroes and ones for the entire sequence. The purpose of this test is to determine whether that number of ones and zeros in a sequence are approximately the same as would be expected for a truly random sequence. The test assesses the closeness of the fraction of ones to ½, that is, the number of ones and zeroes in a sequence should be about the same.

 

Test For Frequency Within A Block

Description: The focus of the test is the proportion of zeroes and ones within M-bit blocks. The purpose of this test is to determine whether the frequency of ones is an M-bit block is approximately M/2.

Runs Test

Description: The focus of this test is the total number of zero and one runs in the entire sequence, where a run is an uninterrupted sequence of identical bits. A run of length k means that a run consists of exactly k identical bits and is bounded before and after with a bit of the opposite value. The purpose of the runs test is to determine whether the number of runs of ones and zeros of various lengths is as expected for a random sequence. In particular, this test determines whether the oscillation between such substrings is too fast or too slow.

Cumulative Sum (Cusum) Test

Description: The focus of this test is the maximal excursion (from zero) of the random walk defined by the cumulative sum of adjusted (-1, +1) digits in the sequence. The purpose of the test is to determine whether the cumulative sum of the partial sequences occurring in the tested sequence is too large or too small relative to the expected behavior of that cumulative sum for random sequences. This cumulative sum may be considered as a random walk. For a random sequence, the random walk should be near zero. For non-random sequences, the excursions of this random walk away from zero will be too large.

The Craps Test

The craps test: Play 200,000 games of craps, counting the wins and the number of throws per game. Each count should follow a certain distribution.

Pearson’s Chi-Squared Test

Procedures whose results are evaluated by reference to the chi-squared distribution.  It tests a null hypothesis stating that the frequency distribution of certain events observed in a sample is consistent with a particular theoretical distribution. The events considered must be mutually exclusive and have total probability.

NIST