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

No mathmatical computation can produce a random result but in the "real world" computers don't exactly just crunch numbers... With a little bit of creativity it should be possible to produce random results of the kind where there is no known method of reproducing or predicting exact outcomes.

One of the easiest to implement ideas I've seen which works universally on all systems is to use static from the computers sound card line in/mic port.

Other ideas include thermal noise and low level timing of cache lines. Many modern PCs with TPM chips have encryption quality hardware random number generators already onboard.

My kneejerk reaction to ping (esp if using ICMP) is that your cheating too blatently. At that point you might as well whip out a giger counter and use background radiation as your random source.