Random numbers

[John (EBo) David]

"der.hans" wrote:
> 
> Am 28. Mar, 2002 schwätzte John (EBo) David so:
> 
> > there was a scientific amirican artical about 10 years ago on building a
> > chaos white noise random generator usinging a diode operated in it's
> > unstable region and sampled...  They got the thing to sit there and
> > wonder all over the place.  Appearently the dude that made it was able
> > to get the built for just a couple of dollars at radio shack.  You would
> > likely be able to build it with an old junk radio or TV ;-)
> 
> So why don't we have these for computers? Do they interfere with other
> stuff? Does the rest of the computer interfere with them? Are they too slow
> or not really random with today's computing capabilities and speeds?

no one built one for a computer that I know of yet.  Also, what most
people are really interested in are not random numbers but psudo-random
numbers that can actually be regenerated when needed given some key...

Have you ever had to debug a program that had a stochastic element in it
and from run to run there was no way to truely replicate a problem? --
been there, done that, added a comand line argument "seed" to the
interface ;-)

  EBo --