2 ms·
That makes sense. I could be wrong but I just have this sneaking suspicion that some systems literally have no inputs, though. Nothing received from the outside
by hunter2_ 3y ago
That makes sense. I could be wrong but I just have this sneaking suspicion that some systems literally have no inputs, though. Nothing received from the outside world... no HCI or sensors of any kind. But maybe such a simple system isn't likely to need much randomness? In your CAN bus example, pretty much anything transmitting onto the bus is doing so because it knows something interesting, as opposed to expressing something deterministic from its own little stored routine?
- kragen 3y agonot necessarily, it might be transmitting a heartbeat so you can detect that that part of the wiring harness is still turned on. i've seen embedded systems with literally no inputs, like the minipov2, but never one that transmits on a network
- hunter2_ 3y agoSo if you wanted a bunch of those to transmit onto the same bus/network, and use exponential backoff to resolve collisions, they would just keep colliding forever, right? Because even if they tried to seed their delay with randomness, they'd all do so the same way every time!
- kragen 3y agoi think so, if they didn't have any other sources of randomness; even the traffic on the can bus would give them all the same 'random' bits if they started at the same time