{"id":5426,"date":"2003-02-06T16:28:00","date_gmt":"2003-02-06T21:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/2003\/02\/06\/maybe-its-the-caffeine\/"},"modified":"2026-07-01T11:32:16","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T15:32:16","slug":"maybe-its-the-caffeine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/2003\/02\/06\/maybe-its-the-caffeine\/","title":{"rendered":"Maybe it&#8217;s the caffeine&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I just had an interesting idea:<\/p>\n<p>You all know that random number generators are not truely random, as they generally get their input from something that could theoretically be predicted (temperature, radio background noise, etc).<\/p>\n<p>I think it would be interesting to see if a person could be used as a random number generator. The data could be fairly easily gathered by sitting a person down at a speech recognition device that will respond to &#8216;one&#8217; and &#8216;zero&#8217; or &#8216;yes&#8217; and &#8216;no&#8217;, recording them as bits in a key. If the person were to rattle off 1024 yes\/no or one\/zero answers, then you would have a 1k key. My presumption is that if you told a person to randomly pick one of the possible answers, they would tend to get fairly random after a while. But, it would be interesting to see. Standard tools for analyzing randomness of data could be used to see just how truely random the person is. It wouldn&#8217;t be hard to collect a number of high-bit samples from an individual, nor would it be difficult to collect samples from any number of people, allowing for proper analysis of a human-based random number generator. It&#8217;d also be an especially geeky way to generate PGP\/GPG keys.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just had an interesting idea: You all know that random number generators are not truely random, as they generally get their input from something that could theoretically be predicted (temperature, radio background noise, etc). I think it would be interesting to see if a person could be used as a random number generator. The\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-moved-from-livejournal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5426"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16205,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5426\/revisions\/16205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}