I have an application that depends on a random number generator to perform. The application might be sensitive to the quality of the random numbers, but I don't know for sure. I'd like to test this, and if it is, what the degree of sensitivity is.
I've currently got a xorshift1024* PRNG plugged in. It's fast and I can directly inject a full 1024 bit state.
I need to be able to degrade it in a controlled fashion, ranging from it's high quality native mode to something quite bad. By quite bad, I mean something far far worse than a simple linear congruential generator. I'm not interested in slowly changing it's output distribution from uniform to say, normal. I just want to be able to make it (technically) crappier and crappier.
I have the sense that this might be a common requirement in other testing applications, so there might be a best practice methodology. At this point my only alternative is to switch off the generator entirely.
Is there a way to incrementally degrade the quality of my PRNG?