3 ms·
Seems like there's a lot of good information there, but I'm way out of my league so YMMV. It's too bad they dismiss using radioactive decay for "practical reas
by PhantomGremlin 11y ago
Seems like there's a lot of good information there, but I'm way out of my league so YMMV.
It's too bad they dismiss using radioactive decay for "practical reasons". There's a guy[1] who has been playing with that, off and on, for over 30 years. He's still at it, I just got some fresh random bits from him a few minutes ago. His hardware doesn't seem that expensive.
BTW we just had a discussion on weak RNGs on the web a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10030036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10030036
As usual with HN, the comments are at least as informative as the article itself.
[1] http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/ http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/
- pdkl95 11y agohttp://holdenc.altervista.org/avalanche/ http://holdenc.altervista.org/avalanche/ This one looked very interesting, and surprisingly cheap and easy to to build.
- aidenn0 11y ago$330 just for the geiger counter[1] 1: http://www.aw-el.com/price.htm http://www.aw-el.com/price.htm
- PhantomGremlin 11y agoOkay, I'm going to really handwave here. There's a ubiquitous product, probably 100+ million instances currently operational just in the USA. This product costs about $10 to make. It has both a radioactive source and a way to (indirectly) detect alpha particles.[1] Yes it's not a perfect analogy. But surely there's a way to build a much cheaper alpha detector? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_detector#Ionization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_detector#Ionization
- daveloyall 11y agoHey, thanks for the link. This http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/statistical_testing/stattest.html http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/statistical_testing/stattest... is very similar to this http://www.bitbabbler.org/what.html http://www.bitbabbler.org/what.html Of course, that makes sense, right? Both pages are about testing a HW RNG.