From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Sep 11 2002 - 15:11:14 MDT
--- gts <gts@optexinc.com> wrote:
>
> Welcome. I'm fairly new here myself, having joined only about a month
> ago. I'm having a great time playing intellectual badmitten with the
> sharpies here. (Seriously to all: this discussion list is a real
> pleasure. I think I will make this one of my homes on the internet.
> Thanks for tolerating me. :-)
Welcome to you both.
>
> > In theory it should be impossible to get truly random numbers,
>
> In theory it is possible to get truly random numbers but it requires
> access to data from quantum processes. For example uranium emits beta
> particles at genuinely random time intervals.
Its far simpler than that. You can make your keyboard a random number
generator. A simple program will time to the nanosecond the amount of
time between each keystroke while you are typing a given amount of
text. Lets assume the monkey we are using in this experiment is a one
finger typer, so that the time per keystroke for a sequence of text
comes as thus for each sequential character:
1.245908659 seconds
1.240981780 "
1.246789999 "
1.239167865 "
1.234782676 "
... etc
>From this list, we can see that the 1.23 and 1.24 indicate that the
first two decimal places are significant digits in terms of
non-randomness. Good, we toss out all significant digits...
5908659
0981780
6789999
9167865
4782676
...etc
By removing the significant digits, we have seemingly random numbers.
We can then run some non-randomness seeking algorithms on the remaining
list and toss out any lack of randomness they continue to see.
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