vladitx wrote:
On May 7, 12:16 am, pau...@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter) wrote:The Apple II monitor though has a source for true random numbers, although with only 16 bits of entropy. The source is a 16-bit counter which is incremented each time the monitor input routine polls the keyboard for a keypress.The entropy is very low, not 16 bits at all. If I needed random numbers from Apple II I wouldn't use more than a bit or two per KEYIN.
On the contrary, since the low byte rolls over in less than 5 milliseconds, and since any keypress made by a human has much more than a 5ms variance, the low bits are essentially random. If you doubt it, do a test. And if the input is in response to a prompt that must be read and responded to, then the variance is more than a second, so that many bits of the high byte are also random. -michael NadaPong: Network game demo for Apple II computers! Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."