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by xkeysc0re 1738 days ago
Writing your own random number generator can be a lot of fun. Lots of sources of entropy out there. Inspired by lavarand[0], I wrote an RNG in Python based on the output of the Global Conscousness Dot[1] (which is a ridiculous project in its own right). There's a lot of ways to visualize and ascertain how "random" your numbers are as well, whether plotting Pearson's with matplotlib or using a command line tool like ent[2] to calculate the degree of entropy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand

[1] https://gcpdot.com/

[2] https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man1/ent.1.html

3 comments

From the GCP project:

> The identification of events and the times at which they occur are specified case by case, as are the statistical recipes. The approach explicitly preserves some latitude of choice, as is appropriate for an experiment exploring new territory. Accepting loose criteria for event identification allows exploration of a variety of categories, while the specification of a rigorous, simple hypothesis test for each event in the formal series assures valid statistics.

I’ve never seen someone so blatantly spell out that they are cherry picking, but also then argue that the cherry picking is good science ;) this is the sort of thing that gives real scientists a bad name.

Hah, thanks for sharing this dot thing, what a bizarre little corner of the internet.
Kind of wild to think that it was a project funded by Princeton and personally supported by their Dean of Engineering for decades!
I dug through the GCP dot page, and if I am understanding it correctly, their near-perfect RNGs have turned out to not be very random?