by natty dread on Sat May 17, 2014 8:28 pm
Well, the thing about random.org is that it's basically useless and a waste of money...
What CC is doing is buying a small discount-sliver of entropy from random.org, then re-using that sliver for all dice-rolls until at some point, it gets updated again... at least, that was what CC was doing when I left, I doubt they have changed it that much.
Thing is... it's not likely to be practically any better than just using a well-tuned PRNG. Since there are lots of players using the entropy pool at the same time, there's already some inherent randomness coming in from the parallelization of dice rolls, ie. the random values being fetched from the pool and used as dice rolls. Timing of the roll matters, etc. Also with the way CC uses the numbers, they can't really be called "True" random numbers, either.
I think the only reason CC uses random.org in the process is just so they can silence dice complainers by saying "hey look, they come from a trusted source of random, it's the best random they have and we pay a good price for it... if you have a problem with our random, go complain at our random provider"... and that's that.
Basically, CC could just as easily replace the dice algorithm with a cheaper, less convoluted solution - and maybe even get better results! But then they wouldn't be able to say "we use random.org"... they wouldn't be "certified" by a 3rd-party business with no actual certification authority...
I used to defend CC's dice because I thought everyone who complains about them are just being whiny little bitches... and, well... people who complain about them are still being whiny little bitches... myself included... but these days I tend to think, what's so special about random.org? Anyone can take a $2 electric fan, point a microphone at it, and have a constant source of prime grade 100% guaranteed true random numbers... and that's just one example. Building an efficient TRNG really isn't rocket science... so why random.org? One reason: to shut up all the complainers. It's a convenient smoke screen and scapegoat, nothing more...
