I'm following this discussion with interest, though I don't completely understand it. But it reminds me that on the old Commodore 64, we got random values by reading a value from an 8-bit register on the sound chip after putting it into 'noise' mode. My understanding was that this was truly random, and although there were only 256 values, people recorded tens of thousands without a pattern ever repeating.

So I'm wondering: Why don't we have something like that in systems today? That function could probably be added to a BIOS chip today for less than a penny. I suppose that reading voltage fluctuations or keyboard timings is another way to bring in outside randomness, but reading a value from a register sure was a simple way to do it.

Aaron B.
My Woefully Neglected Blog, where I occasionally mention Perl.

In reply to Re: How likely is rand() to repeat? by aaron_baugher
in thread How likely is rand() to repeat? by desertrat

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