3 ms·
Ask HN: Are there any good sources of randomness in the human body?
Suppose I wanted to generate a 1 or a 0 with equal probability, and I don’t have access to anything other than my own conscious experience. No coins, no timers, no cameras, no thermometers — nothing. Just sitting in an empty, windowless room. How can I achieve this? I want to be able to generate a genuinely random (that is, no memorising a PRNG algorithm!) result at least once every ten minutes. Any ideas?
- fakamoto 3y agoInteresting question. I dont know the answer, but ive seen daniel negreanu (professional poker player) making decisions that require randomness with a personal method using his mind. I dont know how he does it, or if its really random, but thats something.
- sebg 3y agoDid you see this discussion from a few years ago? => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4508980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4508980 Might be helpful to think through. This reddit post also has a few interesting tidbits: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15vnpu/is_it_possible_to_generate_good_random_number/ https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/15vnpu/is_it_po...
- xanderlewis 3y agoOh, interesting! I did search but didn’t find that.
- dieselgate 3y agoOpen ended question but things that came to me are like "scratch your head and count the number of hairs that fall" or "number of blinks per duration" and see if it's even/odd. This is keeping in mind the title and focusing on the body
- schwartzworld 3y agoClose your eyes, spin around until you lose your sense of direction, open your eyes. Your direction will be pretty close to random.
- paulkrush 3y agoListen to the internal sounds of your body and find something that can be compared against a counter in your head. Passing a finger along your skin slowly will jump at random intervals. Can two people trigger each other?
- paulkrush 3y agoGuess too precise of a measurement, find a median, and use over under.
- vunderba 3y agoStare into space as long as you can without blinking, internally, count the interval until when you're forced to blink. Modulo by 2 to get a zero or one. Repeat as necessary.
- c1plus1equals10 3y agoMy thought was similar: if you breathe in & out equally, you can use that as a quantifier. If not, count the seconds of your breath, modulo by 2 to get a zero or one.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pants2 3y agoPerhaps you could stare at a blank wall and identify the direction or other property of the 'floaters' that appear in your vision.
- neontomo 3y agoPick a word that you like, count the letters on your fingers, even is 0, odd is 1. Choose a longer word to make it harder to predict length. For example, "sesquipedalian" is 14 letters, which even, which is 0. Pick a new word to repeat.