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's not as good as using atmospheric noise but it's still truly random since it depends on the characteristics of the network which is notorious for random non-repeatable behavior.

See Random.org for more on randomness.

Here's an attempt at an implementation:

@ips  : list = getIpAddresses();
@rnd         = PseudorandomNumberGenerator(0 to (ips.count - 1));

@getTrueRandomNumber() { ping(ips[rnd.nextNumber()]).averageTime }