If I were to build something, I think a radio tuned to no station, patched to the mic input on a sound card would be a good and cheap chaos sampler.

How does the random number generator in Perl's rand work? It seems pretty good, and I remember years ago reading that they no longer use the C library's generator.

—John

From the perldelta for v5.6.0:

Better pseudo-random number generator
In 5.005_0x and earlier, perl's rand() function used the C library rand(3) function. As of 5.005_52, Configure tests for drand48(), random(), and rand() (in that order) and picks the first one it finds.

These changes should result in better random numbers from rand().

~monk d4vis
#!/usr/bin/fnord

Hmm, it looks like that doesn't apply to the ActiveState build. Looking through the source, it just calls rand(), which happens to be

holdrand = holdrand * 214013L + 2531011L) >> 16) & 0x7fff)

which I thought was brain-dead but seems to pass tests for randomness including chi-square. Owell.