OK, my fellow geeks. I need a hand here. (Non-geeks welcome also.)<\/p>\n
I want to specify a random number that will not be known by anyone (including myself) until a given date. That way, I can publicly say that I will use this random number, and everyone will know that I have no control over it, and when I use the number, it will be easy to verify that I am using the number I said I would. Confused yet? Let me give an example:<\/p>\n
My only idea so far is to say “the random number I will use will be the result of multiplying the closing stock value on 31-December-2004 of every stock on the NYSE, the result being truncated (floored) and modulus 1000”. That should give me a nice relatively random number from 0-999. The problem with this idea is that I don’t know an easy way to get this information. And there might be too many stocks on the exchange to make this practical. I’d like a number that is a little easier to verify.<\/p>\n
To summarize, I need a number that will be:
\n1) unknown (non-existent) until a given future date that I can pick in advance
\n2) obviously not influenced by me
\n3) relatively random (a decent distribution over at least 100 possible values)
\n4) easy to verify<\/p>\n
Any suggestions?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
OK, my fellow geeks. I need a hand here. (Non-geeks welcome also.) I want to specify a random number that will not be known by anyone (including myself) until a given date. That way, I can publicly say that I will use this random number, and everyone will know that I have no control over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}