🚀 go-pugleaf

     Here's something that's been troubling me for a while: Bearing in
mind that 1) commercially available software (Mathematica, Maple,
etc.) are capable of computing & displaying hundreds of digits of,
say, pi in next to no time (thousands of digits if you let the program
run overnight), and that 2) the digits of pi (well, the first billion
or so anyway) so far appear to be "normal"; that is, they appear with
roughly equal frequency... 

     Is it possible to use some irrational number as the basis for a
strong random number generator?  For example, suppose that I was to
use the decimal part of 17 * (pi * e ^ 5), specifying in advance or
perhaps as part of a public key sequence which decimal digit would be
used as the starting point.  If I were to use the aforementioned idea
with the proviso that the "key" would begin at the 175th digit, this
would appear to be usable as a random-number generation scheme
considerably more "random" than any deterministic function that could
be implemented in software.

     Of course, I could further muddle things by factoring in more
obscure yet easy-to-remember numbers, such as, oh, the inverse
fine-structure constant, Feigenbaum's number, the wavelengths of the
Fraunhofer lines....

     If this is a really stupid idea, please tell me so that I can
quit wasting brain and silicon power on it.  If not, feel free to use
it if you haven't thought of it already.

     Some of you probably have.  You know who you are...

=============================================================================
Dave Schulman                                   capsalad@uful07.phys.ufl.edu
                                                Late of the
                                                University of Florida's
                                                Department of Physics
                                                I'm still one
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