Could a truly random number be generated using pings to pseudo-randomly selected IP addresses?

Question

The question posed came about during a 2nd Year Comp Science lecture while discussing the impossibility of generating numbers in a deterministic computational device.

Th

Answer 1

It doesn't strike me as a good source of randomness.

What metric would you use -- the obvious one is response time, but the range of values you can reasonably expect is small: a few tens of milliseconds to a few thousand. The response times themselves will follow a bell curve and not be randomly distributed across any interval (how would you choose the interval?) so you would have to try and select a few 'random' bits from the numbers.

The LSB might give you a random bit stream, but you would have to consider clock granularity issues - maybe due to how interrupts work you would always get multiples of 2ms on some systems.

There are probably much better 'interesting' ways of getting random bits -- maybe google for a random word, grab the first page and choose the Nth bit from the page.