Soundcard shenanigans

[Anton Vredegoor]

On Sun, 20 Jan 2002 16:23:55 +0100, "Karl M. Syring"
<syring at email.com> wrote:

>"Anton Vredegoor" <anton at vredegoor.doge.nl> schrieb
>> p.s. My motivation for looking for true random number generators is
>> John von Neumann's idea that anyone that is using pseudo random number
>> generators to generate random numbers is "living in a state of sin".
>
>If you are obsessed with true random numbers, you can get some produced by
>radioactive decay: http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/uncgi/Hotbits?nbytes=100
>Another good source is your lowly CCD webcam as the jitter it produces is
>pure quantum noise. There is an issue with the data transmission rate,
>because you have to avoid autocorrelated numbers by any means.

If I would become obsessed with true random numbers so much that I
would avoid autocorrelated numbers by any means, that would hardly be
random. On the contrary: this would be very predictable. Maybe a von
Neumann correction would be adequate here. It consists of converting a
bit pair [0,1] into an output 1, converting [1,0] into an output 0,
and outputting nothing for [0,0] or [1,1] .

Anton.