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Hot on the heels of the news about the League of Entropy, I offer my own analysis of various challenges present in the quest for random bits. Thanks to the exposure of this development by SoylentNews, I dug up my old 2012 proposal and saw that LoE implemented something very similar, but fully automated. Remarkably, it took me some 7 years to realize that my original proposal can be easily adopted for robots, and now I am delighted to share with you a very basic description of the problem, the difficulties, and the implementation details.
And by the way, you may not think that when you see the format, but this is intended as a scholarly article, and it is currently in peer review phase — where it will remain for as long as it is useful — and there are people willing to maintain it. Please feel welcome to offer comments, ideas, corrections via email or xmpp, and I will do my best to create a review journal and credit everyone involved, as appropriate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 21 2019, @09:29AM (2 children)
And if you can't for some reason(s), then all this collaborative generation stuff is probably useless to you too for similar reasons.
The lottery can say they're using those random numbers as a seed but how can you be sure? You still have to trust them. AND you have to trust them in HOW they use that seed too.
In fact having the lottery use a publicly visible physical process (e.g. "juggled/shuffled" balls) to pick their lottery numbers might still be better than some blackbox random generation since:
a) the gamblers can see for themselves whether the degree of randomness is good enough for them
b) potential gamblers might see and have the hope that the stuff isn't 100% random and they can somehow have a better chance than random of winning... ;)
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday June 21 2019, @02:15PM
This comment feels too soon, after the recent random number generation article on soylent, but here it is anyway:
Random Number:
https://www.xkcd.com/221/ [xkcd.com]
Tour of Accounting:
https://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25 [dilbert.com]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday June 21 2019, @06:25PM
A web cam of a fire is a good source of random numbers. I used to advise an over amplified receiver with no antenna, but these days those are harder to connect...and transistors don't produce as high a quality of noise as vacuum tubes did.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.