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Would the uranium marbles be at all likely to cause bit errors? Would this decrease the lifespan of the system?
Doesn't answer your question, but might be a start.
Would the uranium marbles be at all likely to cause bit errors? Would this decrease the lifespan of the system?
Some numbers for uranium glass: https://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/consumer%20products/vase... Doesn't answer your question, but might be a start.
In Chernobyl you likely do not actually need to add the marbles to get the device to work.
Impossible to predict the next number - no matter how much information about the universe you know.
Hey whatever happened to your cat?
This is probably a dumb question, but wouldn't recording the millisecond timestamp mod 2 of each decay be a lot easier and also produce a uniform distribution (at least at the rate this thing seems to be registering decays)?
Not a dumb question! I tried this approach using 4-microsecond ticks and was surprised to catch a (subtle) bias. So I in the end I basically used two different RNG algos (both with slight biases) and XOR’d them together.
Would love to isolate why these on their own appear to have a bias but testing is a super laborious process (takes roughly 3 days to generate a 1 megabit file).
Of course, I could always speed up the testing cycle by using a more radioactive sample ;)
How does one even get uranium marbles?
They’re not actually that radioactive so they’re very easy to get ahold of. Amazon and eBay might work (I got mine from one of those sources, I think), but I also put a more specialized supplier in the parts list.