[Cryptography] The ultimate random source

[Dave Horsfall]

On Thu, 20 Feb 2014, Bill Frantz wrote:

> Now my statistics is a bit rusty, and I know we can't assume equal color 
> probability for each position, but I think we have so much margin here 
> that a simplifying assumption is justified. We get 6 ** 600 
> possibilities and we haven't even considered small changes in position 
> of each M&M. 6**600 overflows my HP15 calculator and makes me feel 
> comfortable seeding a PRNG.

Your statistics is spot-on.  My trusty HP-42S says 7.7758921822E466, which
is pretty big :-)  With Unix "bc", I get:

6^600
77758921822273638463652243033738663459096026047499749793055195367088\
51240595825119152763630559279561914762582119686987497940622017964689\
94358639583677597277966221496081386040428524624036837389354858526340\
57709256771299230380098822466080142001159030156662377138169091661053\
37802730615914058869840104453151780612057444464745298260875996761919\
24470372419816391019296687161848319000324789980278116093440553336474\
88533711459486991110405287751122235682242271887405273317376

-- Dave