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I needed a bad random number generator for an illustration, and chose RANDU, possibly the worst random number generator that was ever widely deployed. Donald Knuth comments on RANDU in the second volume of his magnum opus.
When this chapter was first written in the late 1960s, a truly horrible random number generator called RANDU was commonly used on most of the world's computers.
Last time, I mentioned μRNG, a true random number generator (TRNG) that takes physical sources of randomness as input. These sources are independent but non-uniform. This post will present the entropy extractor μRNG uses to take non-uniform bits as input and produce uniform bits as output.
We will present Python code for playing with the entropy extractor. (μRNG is extremely efficient, but the Python code here is not; it's just for illustration.) The code will show how to use the pyfinite library to do arithmetic over a finite field.