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Rube-Goldberg Type Random Number Generators?

Posted by Cliff on from the state-lotteries-got-nothing-on-these-contraptions dept.

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?

6 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Resistors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I've read about hardware implementations of random number generators that use thermal noise from resistors.

  2. Just use /. by eyepeepackets · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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!
  3. Smoke by tswinzig · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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 ... he's gone."
  4. OK, how about this boring idea? by satch89450 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  5. SGI's random lava lamp by MrIcee · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Workers at Silicon Graphics Inc (SGI) did this a few years back... here is a reference to their website that discusses it.

    In a nutshell, they pointed a camera at a lava lamp and used an algorithm to reduce the image into random numbers.

  6. Random Numbers UK Style by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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