Slashdot Mirror
Rube-Goldberg Type Random Number Generators?
stercor asks: "I've been considering random number generators made with easily-available materials. Living in Oregon might suggest photoelectric cells and rain. Or something to do with slugs (generation rate IS a factor, however)
My question is what other off-the-wall shelf hare-brained brilliant ideas can other Slashdot readers come up with? Please limit ideas to ones that would actually work." When I was younger, I was always intrigued by the rigs used by most State Lotteries. You know the ones: dump balls into a chamber, throw in a fan/vacuum combination to agitate the balls and to allow a random one to shoot thru a tube when the button was pressed (basically, a high tech version of your average BINGO machine). Has anyone else seen or built a contraption that does something similar but in a weird, roundabout or weird and roundabout way?
I usually go for frequency and location of traffic accidents. It's fairly random (if you throw out locations that are common), and generation speed is VERY high.
--MonMotha
Bury a landmine in a playground. Pin pieces of paper with numbers writen on them to the shirts of a group of kids. (more kids = more random) Proceed to feed them Cocoa Puffs, Pixie Stix, Mountain Dew, Jolt Cola, Bawls, Starbucks Espresso for several hours. Unleash their fury onto the playground. The number of the kid to find said landmine first, is your random number. Enjoy!
Viva La Revolucion! Buy a Mac!
I think the site is gone with the death of reality.sgi.com but they used to have an O2 genterating random numbers using lava lamps.
if anyone comes up with some really cool idea thats very random, and can becompressed really small, that would be a nifty hardware project to make for a computer, to use real random numbers (winamp definitly could use it [dont get started on me using windows, i hate it too])...kinda like that mini-combo lock that was made for government computer security, its really really small, and implanted on a circuit board, so its almost impossible to hack without opening up the computer
I've read about hardware implementations of random number generators that use thermal noise from resistors.
HotBits. I doubt you could implement it at home, though.
I've yet to notice any coorelation between a topic and the number of troll/flamebait/offtopic responses, so just grab a topic, count the number of whatever responses and factor the result in whatever way you want.
:)
Hope this helps.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
define random.
Yeah, I didn't think so...
The middle mind speaks!
Chicken droppings on a grid.
How about a webcam that is aimed at a black backdrop, with an incense burner hidden just out of frame, below. You light some incense, turn the webcam on, every time you take a picture you get a random black and white image. Do some fancy pixel crunching to generate a number.
"And like that
I've always wanted a highly detailed computer similation of those things.
A button on a sidewalk somewhere. If people step on it/kids play with it, you're ensured a random number.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
I've been vexed that the sound card plus CD-ROM drive combination always shows signal at around -50 dBVU in CoolEdit. So, just for grins, I decided to capture a few seconds of the noise and analyze the properties. I was astonished to see that the resulting signal is a white-noise pattern with a slight emphasis at the high end (when sampled at 44 kilosamples per second). In short, it looks like diode noise with a 4 kilohertz square wave thrown in.
That suggests to me that this would make a fair source of random samples, especially after you slot out the interfering signal.
How many computers don't have cheap sound cards and CD-ROM drives?
I can't find my polarizers, so I can't test this, but I think you could rig something up with a cheap CCD webcam. If you look at a poorly lit image from a CCD there's an awful lot of noise, and the image sort of rides on top of this noise. If you took your cheap CCD webcam and kept reducing the light to it till you got mostly noise it'd be simple to capture and generate random data from. I was thinking of a shoebox with the sensor inside, USB cable coming through a small light-tight hole. Make a hole in front of the lens and stick a pair of polarizers in front of that hole. Rotate the polarizers to get a light intensity such that you get lots of noise.
If you snap a frame you'll get some random bits. Somebody could break the randomness by shining a really bright light through the polarizers, but as long as you can control access to the shoe box you'd be fine.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
Shred a bunch of junk mail with a confetti style (cross cut) shredder, dump the resulting pieces on a scanner, then run the capture through an OCR program.
"From my cold, dead hands you damn, dirty apes!" - CH
Shocked! Yes, shocked and dismayed I am to note that the SGI lava-lamp random number generator has not been mentioned! Unfortunately, it seems to be gone. It's too bad, really... it was a VERY cool combination of the physical world and computers.
http://lavarand.sgi.com used to tell you about an apparatus that SGI's researchers had set up to generate "truly random" numbers. It worked by using several (about 6?) lava lamps clamped in laboratory stands and placed very close together. A SGI camera (an IndyCam, IIRC) was pointed at the slowly roiling liquids, and they generated random numbers by the percentage of the frame that was occluded. (Transparent vs. opaque liquid)
Or something like that. It's been years since I looked at it, and it's gone now. Damn.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
- Copies a headline from a news source (The Register, MSNBC, Kuro5hin, etc.)
- Submits the story to Slashdot
- Checks back to see if the story has been accepted
That should be random enough for anyone.Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
i could just go around to the neighbors house, make a little noise, and count how many times the dog barks at me. perhaps, the number of barks in a minute.
the problam is, you wont get zero. you begin counting with the start of barking. and you are unlikely to get anything around one or two - dogs are like that.
still, it should be something kinda random.
Just get a Seismograph, and return the heigh of the last reading. Sensitive enough to measure footsteps across the room, so you shouldn't have a problem if you place it right.
I live near a freeway, so I have plenty of randomnees avaiable in the traffic going by my house.
Warning, with this, and many other schemes you need to normalize the data. Otherwise you will tend to get larger numbers during rush hour, and smaller ones during the night. Also a big snow fall (shuts down traffic) will change the values received. Be aware of these issues, if someone else finds out what you are using to generate random numbers they may use that to break your scheme. (Even if you numbers are random, just over a smaller range)
A "Jump to Random Conclusions" mat. Replace "Moot" and "Loose One Turn" with numbers and you've got yourself a million dollar idea.
You'd need to build something like i binary tree, where, say, a ball bearing or golf ball or whatnot starts a the top of a a board, and can either go left or right. You build as many stages as you need depending on the size of the random number, then number the possible results at the bottom.
The problem is that you'd need to be fairly precise, or you won't get true random numbers. This is the core problem.
Counting, say, the number of raindrops that fall in a certain time frame, or number of cars that go by your house with the bass turned up may be random, but the distribution won't be even. Either you're going to get a lot of rain, or no rain, and very seldomly somewhere in between -- and if you're like me, many many cars, but very few blissful, quiet nights.
In a nutshell, they pointed a camera at a lava lamp and used an algorithm to reduce the image into random numbers.
There's measuring beta particles of decaying Krypton: Fourmilab Hotbits
... google.
Then, there's LAVALAMP randomness: LavaRND
Oh, and you could connect a radio to a sparcstation, and use broadcast noise at: Random.org
Hell, you could use a webcam pointing at a staticy TV.
Lots of possibilities. Amazing what you can find with
fnord.
How about a very precise cooling fan tachometer? Generate a 0 for even, a 1 for odd. For example, 320.02 rpm = odd, 320.03 rpm = even.
Well there you go, the Karma Whores have taken over the asylum! I think that downmoderation combined with the GCC story getting a mere 8 comments at the time of writing, is proof that the real users of OS OSes have effed off elsewhere.
I'm gonna do some whoring just for fun, its all /. is good for nowadays. Putting thought into posts rareley gets them modded up unless they are in laymans terms and agree with the popular opinions. So much for encouraging fair and intelligent discussion. And now we have the "Meta Moderation" to weed out the moderators who express opinions that go "against the grain". Whoopee!
Troll/flamebait/offtopic posts will increase as the intelligent readers read elsewhere and the site becomes a more consistent and fertile battleground for such toss, aided by meta-moderation. The word-based-karma system simply shifts the aim towards "excellent" and moderator status, with which real damage to the comment system can be done.
Take a look back through the archives of /., you'll see how far downhill this site has slipped. Fuck it, might as well have been sold to AOL.
How about using a hash of the IP's of the Code Red hits your server takes? (he says with tougue firmly in cheek)...
www.eFax.com are spammers
Nothing is random!
It's just you who can't comprehend/grasp what's going on!
my sig
Over in the UK they had a scheme running years before all these lotteries called the Premium Bond scheme. The idea was that you bought one or more 'bonds' and once a week a random number generator would pull out a bond number and the winner got a million quid.
I could be wrong on this but the random number machine (called Ernie) was built by a firm called Logitec and used the noise from a neon bulb as a random number generator. Since this was a government project I assume that it worked right.
Regards
Ed Almos
... if you sample white noise from any source, you'll have a random value. Analogue synthesizers commonly use a reverse-biased diode of some sort to generate noise as it reaches the Zener region. You used to get special "noise diodes" - basically Zener diodes that were chosen because they were extremely noisy.
A good, simple white noise source is a reverse-biased transistor. Get an NPN transistor, connect the base to negative and the emitter to positive through a large (220k or so) resistor. Look at the voltage on the emitter - noise! Use an amplifier of some kind to get a useful voltage - you're not too bothered about hi-fi here, although theoretically distortion could skew the results (hint - what would clipping do to high and low values? What would crossover distortion do?)
See here for details. It tells you how to build your own hardware to capture random numbers from a radiation source, and also has a server that can give you random bits from his source.
The rest of this site is unspeakably cool - it's the home pages and collected wisdom of John Walker, founder of Autodesk - you have heard of AutoCad, right?
i've heard that putting a webcam on a lava lamp and then generating a number from the shape of the lava is a very good randomizer.
Somewhere on this page I have hidden my signature.
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
Point a webcam at an ant farm, really busy road, TV tuned to a too-distant station (really noisy picture), or similar. Run the webcam's image files through MD5 or some similar high-quality bit-blender.
It's easy to make up & spread cool- and credible-sounding stuff. Finding & checking hard facts is hard work.
Get an AM radio and tune it to static.
input to a sound card.
One random number generator.
Just line Tom thought up in Cardnal of the Kremilen.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Or any other "analog" input for that matter.
Just turn the gain up to the max and read the values. It's plenty noisy.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Terry Ritter offers us "Random Number Machines: A Literature Survey" which discusses random numbers from noise and other sources. Well worth a look.
Ritter expounds on Geiger counters:
Now they also offer canned software - a random number generator based on radioactive decay.
I hate call waitin`~+~~~
NO CARRIER
I've had this idea for YEARS...
You have a radio receiver -- but you don't set it to ONE channel, but rather you receive all (or as many as practical) channels at once.
One radio station isn't completely random -- programs repeat, station IDs are said several times a day, the same commercials come on.
But the combination of ALL radio stations at any given time is 100% unique and probably will never occurr again as long as the planet is around (assuming a free press).
Taking the values of all stations simultaneously could result in a neat random seed that is never repeated twice.
Is this a stupid idea?!?
Phase 1: Get all radio waves on planet.
Phase 2: Reduce to a number with enough bits to always be unique (128? 256? 1024?)
Phase 3: ?
Phase 4: Profit
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com