asciilifeform: in an honest rng

asciilifeform: afaik the only remaining, and most obvious 'loss' is the one implicit in prime number theorem ( where , wat, ~10k possible rng outputs correspond to same prime output )

asciilifeform: ( she is using my sanitized gpg bignum. but i did not preserve koch's faux-rng atrocity ; so anything pertaining to entropy, is new )

asciilifeform: when i sit to play a game, it feels like dereliction of duty, with, e.g., ffa yet undone, dulap not yet replaces, scintollator rng not complete, 9000 other processes ☟︎

asciilifeform: and since i built the rng, i can also be quite certain that there is not such a prime that it will forever avoid generating.

asciilifeform: the use of constructed primes, potentially amplifies small/temporary imperfections in the rng, into fatal

asciilifeform: 1 problem is that perfect uniform distrib and perfectly independent rng bits, cannot be shown to exist physically.

asciilifeform: and i will NOT make a rng that doesn't work with msdos box

asciilifeform: i dun like having rng that is physically capable of putting out nonrandom.

asciilifeform: ( a shit rng that fools ent is much easier to build, even by accident, than same vs dieharder )

asciilifeform: really it is good for finding catastrophically broken rng, and no moar

asciilifeform: no actual detail of rng diddle, shown.

asciilifeform: unbiased -- in this case -- would mean that it eats ANY bitstring from rng, R, and maps it to UNIQUE prime , P

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: chance of these without sabotaged rng is < chance of meteorite

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: all that means is that one of the inputs comes from rng.

asciilifeform: because all you do is get NEXT N bits from rng, they have ( if rng is proper ) 0 relation to previous N

asciilifeform: rejecting rng result that doesn't pass the gcd sieve -- leaks nothing

asciilifeform: apeloyee: no contradiction. the variability of time is in the ~test~, not the output result , which naturally will vary depending on what rng gave you

asciilifeform: phun phakt, this calculation is taken from the gpg autopsies last summer, when asciilifeform was chasing imaginary rng boojum after somebody found a real one

asciilifeform: i actually considered own variant of this for 'chemical rng' , but realized that it is screamingly impractical

asciilifeform: you will notice that koch's rng atrocity ain't in there.

asciilifeform: !#s gpg rng

asciilifeform: cruciform: if you 'just want' 'an rng, dun matter what kind' -- the cost is 0, your cpu maker already supplied you with a liquishit rng

asciilifeform: FG-II rng will prolly have 4 pins, 1 for shifter pulse, to make yoking ultra-easy at ~0 cost.

asciilifeform: i'm partial to well-made electric rng

asciilifeform: it is my policy not to ask FG buyers any questions, i have nfi why bought, whether to use as rng or fishing lure, and don't really care

asciilifeform: i would ask 'what's to keep some unrelated d00d from making walletrons that simply talk over rs232..' but then remembered that it is probably same thing that keeps'em from making rng where ditto despite how OMFG WE PUBLISHED DESIGN

asciilifeform: i ran into it when trying to replicate the classical 'dead rng' debian setup

asciilifeform: lol debian rng

asciilifeform: Barbarossa_: there are commercial rng that use interferometer, yes ( NONE of them auditable by owner, in fact many epoxied and otherwise artificially painful to examine )

asciilifeform: 'We submitted extensive information about our random number generator (RNG) to an independent organization. We asked this trusted resource to perform an in-depth analysis of the randomness of the output of the RNG, and its implementation in the shuffling of the cards on our platform.' ☟︎

asciilifeform: Barbarossa_: where can i find out re pokerstars rng ?

asciilifeform: Barbarossa_: see also http://qntra.net/2016/08/rng-whitening-bug-weakened-all-versions-of-gpg

asciilifeform: i experimented with many types of rng.

asciilifeform: analogue effects in practice suck for proper rng

asciilifeform: i expect a pokerist would have something to say re rng, aha

asciilifeform: plenty of green field left also. e.g. the freebsd-had-no-rng-for-two-years thing

asciilifeform: !~google mercury switch rng

asciilifeform: and - while we're on subj -- the naive replacement, a ball-in-pipe tilt switch, is NOT suitable for rng -- contact bounce is patterned; and oxidized contacts -- semiconduct.

asciilifeform: in other quasi-noose, here's a simple electric rng suitable for very low bit-rate application ( e.g. walletrons for sig nonce ) : small mercury tilt switch, gates clock signal to counter, and a flipflop. when the latter toggles, the counter value is forwarded to a register; every 2 shots end up vonneumanned and xor'd into the output reg.

asciilifeform: 'rng bits are expensive' spawned quite a few idiocies , by itself

asciilifeform: ( tldr : superiority of the FUCKGOATS-enabled approach, of get-new-N-bits-from-rng-then-primalitytest-until-done, vs the kochian get-N-bits-then-increment-until-passes-millerrabin ) ☟︎☟︎

asciilifeform: well they still play cards, that get shuffled, just like 500 yrs ago. unless i misunderstood the rng remark.

asciilifeform: so can't be the rng

asciilifeform: not if you own an rng. ☟︎

asciilifeform: bot node, generally, has nothing like an actual rng.

asciilifeform: ( that, or lovingly crafted bot with delay rng )

asciilifeform: ( statistical tests only reveal broken rng , but never a working one )

asciilifeform: dijkstra's 'testing reveals presence of bugs, but not absence' applies just the same to rng.

asciilifeform: ( for what does this operation use the original values that came out of the rng ? )

asciilifeform: which is frustrating because you can't resort to 'empirical test' here , because circular, there EXISTS NO 'gold rng'

asciilifeform: i thought 'rap' lyrics were officially required to come out of a certified an'sealed shannonizer, like las vegas one armed bandit rng

asciilifeform: the plan 'for broken rng' is to have 7 running from 7 batteries.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: one nuance is -- it is folly to plan FOR a broken rng. 'what to do if a shell lands in my trench? jump twenty metres and scatter yerself around'

asciilifeform: could play same game without leaving home: connect rng to pistol, if fails to produce shitoshi privkey - bang

asciilifeform: 'Sources need to be statistically assessed. The quality of the entropy being produced needs to be estimated so that enough can be released to properly seed the RNG. The dieharder and TESTU01 suites are good but they both require prohibitively large amounts of random data to operate. NIST's SP800-90B tests seem to be statistically sound and have manageable data requirements....' << didjaknow!

asciilifeform: i.e. a signed(S) could not have practically come into existence before you broadcast S, if the latter is a long rng turd

asciilifeform: a sound card rng is considerably better than... none at all. but this is all that can be said for it. ☟︎

asciilifeform: incidentally at one time quite a few folx, incl. some of the people here, used sound card rng

asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-06-14#1670142 << this is pure gold, ty for posting, phf . it's rng-nonsense from back when folx were posting ~erudite~ nonsense, rather than the regular redditola snore ☝︎☟︎

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the koch episode was actually illustrative of the futility of 'just fix /dev/random'. it'd have done ~zero~ against the koch rng poisoning thing.