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Comment by kzrdude | Hacker News Reader

I was trying to find a mental way to do a true coin toss. Anyone has ideas for how to truly dig into some randomness? Maybe most would think it's impossible, but aren't we at least better placed to do this better than deterministic machines (or maybe we are not - the true free will debate :)?

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If you have two people, you can have person A ask person B to “pick a random number”, and use heads for odd, tails for even. Don’t tell person B why you’re asking and my guess is you’re relatively random heads/tails. No studies that I am aware of to back this up, so people could be biased towards odd/even, but a bias correction could correct that too.

I’d bet people generally think even numbers and multiples of 5 seem less random.

3 and 7 seem random :)

Look around the room for objects in sight. For each object, take its common name and count how many of the letters are "odd" letters acegikmoqsuwy, then mod 2. "Window" -> "wiow" -> 4 -> 0. Each word yields a single bit of very slow, pretty good entropy. Don't do this in the same room twice.

Perhaps you could do a similar thing with a book. Randomly open it and blindly point to a line in the book. Then do something with that line.

I wonder how effective it would be simply to count vowels mod 2. Much faster to calculate, at least for me.

I suspect there's a strong bias in vowelCount % 2. A quick look at English 100 most common [1] has 1's at 73% and 0's at 27%. That would even out with longer words but I wonder how much. Maybe there's something else that's just as easy with less bias?

[1]https://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/common-words-100.htm

Hm. That makes this puzzle all the more interesting. Maybe it's because I made a Wordle solver app recently, but word statistics are on my mind.

There are now Quantum Random Number Generators on the market. I've seen hardware ones that use PCIe.

Here's a university that apparently is now providing a qrng service for free with live streaming: https://qrng.anu.edu.au/

Author asked about mental ways to come up with random numbers. A "QRNG" is obviously not purely mental.

I took the digits of a random phone number in my memory (excluding area code) H for odd T for even

Your network operator might use blocks of numbers where many share the first or last digits.

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