This is how Fisher critiqued Mendel's experiments -- they were too perfect!
Robert Brown has a page with a bunch of info about dieharder and statistical testing of random generators in general [2]
So I wrote a little "additional entropy daemon" that would read things like CPU temperature fluctuations, signal noise on soundcards if installed etc (I forget them all exactly but there were a few), "bleach them" so they had reasonable statistical properties (eg the soundcard one before bleaching was almost all zeros with just occasional spikes in it so you want that to be normalized a bit) mix them together somewhat chaotically and then feed them into the sponge function with a relatively low entropy estimate. This meant our servers wouldn't block. I used diehard to test the randomness of the sources I was using before and after the mixing.
The bug got fixed and people generally got comfortable using /dev/urandom rather than /dev/random, so my little process moved on to live on a farm with other daemon processes that were retired from use. I don't even have the source code any more.
For example
> Let's say we have the following binary string. s=00000000000000000000 It is obviously not random since there are no ones in the string. Therefore, we must check that there are roughly an equal number of zeros and ones in the string.
guytv•2mo ago
Strange.
(0110100001100101011011000110110001101111001000000111011101101111011100100110110001100100)
cnnlives9099•2mo ago
Antibabelic•2mo ago
dominicrose•2mo ago