Linear feedback shift register?

Question

Lately I bumped repeatedly into the concept of LFSR, that I find quite interesting because of its links with different fields and also fascinating in itself. It took me some effort to understand, the final help was this really good page, much better than the (at first) cryptic wikipedia entry. So I wanted to write some small code for a program that worked like a LFSR. To be more precise, that somehow showed how a LFSR works. Here's the cleanest thing I could come up with after some lenghtier attempts (Python):

def lfsr(seed, taps):
    sr, xor = seed, 0
    while 1:
        for t in taps:
            xor += int(sr[t-1])
        if xor%2 == 0.0:
            xor = 0
        else:
            xor = 1
        print xor
        sr, xor = str(xor) + sr[:-1], 0
        print sr
        if sr == seed:
            break

lfsr('11001001', (8,7,6,1))      #example

I named "xor" the output of the XOR function, not very correct. However, this is just meant to show how it circles through its possible states, in fact you noticed the register is represented by a string. Not much logical coherence.

This can be easily turned into a nice toy you can watch for hours (at least I could :-)

def lfsr(seed, taps):
    import time
    sr, xor = seed, 0
    while 1:
        for t in taps:
            xor += int(sr[t-1])
        if xor%2 == 0.0:
            xor = 0
        else:
            xor = 1
        print xor
        print
        time.sleep(0.75)
        sr, xor = str(xor) + sr[:-1], 0
        print sr
        print
        time.sleep(0.75)

Then it struck me, what use is this in writing software? I heard it can generate random numbers; is it true? how? So, it would be nice if someone could:

• explain how to use such a device in software development
• come up with some code, to support the point above or just like mine to show different ways to do it, in any language

Also, as theres not much didactic stuff around about this piece of logic and digital circuitry, it would be nice if this could be a place for noobies (like me) to get a better understanding of this thing, or better, to understand what it is and how it can be useful when writing software. Should have made it a community wiki?

That said, if someone feels like golfing... you're welcome.

Answer 1

To make it really elegant and Pythonic, try to create a generator, yield-ing successive values from the LFSR. Also, comparing to a floating point 0.0 is unnecessary and confusing.

A LFSR is just one of many ways to create pseudo-random numbers in computers. Pseudo-random, because there numbers aren't really random - you can easily repeat them by starting with the seed (initial value) and proceeding with the same mathematical operations.

Answer 2

Actually, algorithms based on LFSR are very common. CRC is actually directly based on LFSR. Of course, in computer science classes people talk about polynomials when they're talking about how the input value is supposed to be XORed with the accumulated value, in electornics engineering we talk about taps instead. They are the same just different terminology.

CRC32 is a very common one. It's used to detect errors in Ethernet frames. That means that when I posted this answer my PC used an LFSR based algorithm to generate a hash of the IP packet so that my router can verify that what it's transmitting isn't corrupted.

Zip and Gzip files are another example. Both use CRC for error detection. Zip uses CRC32 and Gzip uses both CRC16 and CRC32.

CRCs are basically hash functions. And it's good enough to make the internet work. Which means LFSRs are fairly good hash functions. I'm not sure if you know this but in general good hash functions are considered good random number generators. But the thing with LFSR is that selecting the correct taps (polynomials) is very important to the quality of the hash/random number.

Your code is generally toy code since it operates on a string of ones and zeros. In the real world LFSR work on bits in a byte. Each byte you push through the LFSR changes the accumulated value of the register. That value is effectively a checksum of all the bytes you've push through the register. Two common ways of using that value as a random number is to either use a counter and push a sequence of numbers through the register, thereby transforming the linear sequence 1,2,3,4 to some hashed sequence like 15306,22,5587,994, or to feed back the current value into the register to generate a new number in seemingly random sequence.

It should be noted that doing this naively using bit-fiddling LFSR is quite slow since you have to process bits at a time. So people have come up with ways using pre-calculated tables to do it eight bits at a time or even 32 bits at a time. This is why you almost never see LFSR code in the wild. In most production code it masquerades as something else.

But sometimes a plain bit-twiddling LFSR can come in handy. I once wrote a Modbus driver for a PIC micro and that protocol used CRC16. A pre-calculated table requires 256 bytes of memory and my CPU only had 68 bytes (I'm not kidding). So I had to use an LFSR.

Answer 3

Below is a variation on your code using integers and binary operators instead of strings. It also uses yield as someone suggested.

def lfsr2(seed, taps):
    sr = seed
    nbits = 8
    while 1:
        xor = 1
        for t in taps:
            if (sr & (1<<(t-1))) != 0:
                xor ^= 1
        sr = (xor << nbits-1) + (sr >> 1)
        yield xor, sr
        if sr == seed:
            break

nbits = 8
for xor, sr in lfsr2(0b11001001, (8,7,6,1)):
    print xor, bin(2**nbits+sr)[3:]

Answer 4

There are many applications of LFSRs. One of them is generating noise, for instance the SN76489 and variants (used on the Master System, Game Gear, MegaDrive, NeoGeo Pocket, ...) use a LFSR to generate white/periodic noise. There's a really good description of SN76489's LFSR in this page.

Answer 5

If we assume that seed is a list of ints rather than a string (or convert it if it is not) then the following should do what you want with a bit more elegance:

def lfsr(seed, taps) :
  while True:
    nxt = sum([ seed[x] for x in taps]) % 2
    yield nxt
    seed = ([nxt] + seed)[:max(taps)+1]

Example :

for x in lfsr([1,0,1,1,1,0,1,0,0],[1,5,6]) :
  print x