3 ms·

it’s just a publicity stunt. They do feed it as a one source, but it’s basically for fun.

• sterlind 5y ago
  Any CA worth their salt uses some sort of true random number generator by now, right? Like measuring radioactive decay or something? I imagine if you (e.g.) XOR the state of a strong PRNG with the timestamp from an atomic clock whenever your Geiger counter goes off, you'd have infinite true random.
  • tatersolid 5y ago
    Please don’t use the described approach, which doesn’t un-bias or decorrelate the samples. And where do you get the seed for your PRNG anyway? There are literally thousands of academic papers written on the topic of un-biasing and “extracting entropy” from noise sources. Most are overly complex; if you want a practical but secure approach see Yarrow, Fortuna, or the Linux kernel entropy pool.
    • sterlind 5y ago
      The seed from the PRNG would come from e.g. a few thousand samples of the radioactive decay. Isn't radioactive decay true random because it's a quantum effect? How could you have biased/correlated Geiger blips?
      • tatersolid 5y ago
        Let’s assume you’re getting absolute time stamps or arrival intervals from your Geiger counter. How do you convert those into a uniformly random PRNG seed? They will all be biased to a small range depending on your radiation source and measurement apparatus. Secondly, non-cryptographic PRNGs leak their state from their outputs. This is a solved problem. Many academic and engineering hours have been put into real solutions. Dear reader, please use a recognized secure scheme instead of the amateur ad-hoc approach recommended up-thread. It has no theoretic or engineering basis. Don’t roll your own crypto.