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 ;)
> A fast clock (down) is used to increase a counter. Whenever a detection is made (up), the counter is read and reset, generating one random number.
> We restrict to a counter that generates values from 0 to M −1, a modulo M counter. When M = 2 we have a binary random number generator.
It doesn't have to be a millisecond timestamp, any clock that's much faster than the rate of decay should work. Every time a decay is detected, take the elapsed time in clock units mod 2 and that's your random bit.