
Why are countries creating public random number generators? - newman8r
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/why-are-countries-creating-public-random-number-generators
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RexetBlell
Bitcoin block hashes would be a decent source of randomness.

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Arnt
I think you mean "might be".

There's a passage on the subject in Knuth volume 2. Even Knuth needs to test
and debug his code, no matter what how good he thought the results "would be".
And his conclusion: Use a mathematical foundation for a PRNG, nothing else
will do.

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svat
Indeed. The passage is from near the beginning of Volume 2 (Chapter 3), where
he says how he came up with something that seemed like it should be "super
random", tried it, and found that it was not. It ends with:

> The moral of this story is that random numbers should not be generated with
> a method chosen at random. Some theory should be used.

and the rest of the chapter proceeds to give some relevant theory.

