Are you not tired of this yet? Let me help you. I am @RetiredCoder, you catched me again. I am also the guy with the magic circle that everyone (except you) seems to know about. Oh and I'm also @mcdouglasx, just to annoy everyone who reads this. I'm also your mom, please come downstairs, your school lunchbox is ready.


There isn't a single paper that says to use random starting points when we have multiple kangaroos per herd; on the contrary, they start from well-defined positions. To use random start points is an arbitrary decision: first of all, on average, it degrades the expected runtime; second, it's used for spin-off strategies, like in Bernstein's pre-computation paper "Computing discrete logs faster".

It's debatable if walking forward and hitting a collision is the same as the birthday paradox, which requires all the balls are in the same urn. The common factor is conceptual only: probability of success.


That statement, just like JLP's entire kangaroo implementation in general, is not reviewed or confirmed by any real expert, and it might be a very contextual statement relative to his implementation and personal opinions at that time, influenced by whatever he was reading or thinking. Also, I don't understand, now you defend Kangaroo or what are you doing?