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?

Comments

OK, how about this boring idea?

[satch89450]

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?

SGI's random lava lamp

[MrIcee]

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.