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Appropriate sources of entropy

Posted May 26, 2008 5:42 UTC (Mon) by ikm (subscriber, #493)
In reply to: Appropriate sources of entropy by giraffedata
Parent article: Appropriate sources of entropy

Johnson noise and other crap like that. Usually it's not really totally uniformly random, but still quite unpredictable :)

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Posted May 30, 2008 22:16 UTC (Fri) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link]

Search for "randomness extractor" for information on turning an unknown 
random distribution into a known one.  It's quite difficult, but often 
possible.  Cool combinatorics at work, and also closely related to error 
correcting codes and hashing.  (They're all related by the concept of 
distance between and distinguishability of the sampled points.)