Mads' service samples atmospheric noise -- see his background essay for more details --
which gets aggregated and can then be had via Corba, HTTP or SOAP. Given how R has such a wonderful (and probably
little know) url() function to aquire data over the web, I
figured it might be worthwhile to show how R can acquire truly random
numbers. This snipped downloads a 10,000 x 2 vector, and plots it:
> X <- read.table(url(paste("http://www.random.org/cgi-bin/randnum",
"?num=10000&min=-1000000000&max=1000000000&col=2",
sep="")),
header=FALSE)
> plot(X, pch=".")
(The paste() is used to split the overly long line for the full
URL.) The arguments to the interface at random.org are hopefully
self-explanatory. Otherwise, full details are available.
As repeated simulations are often rather time-intensive, downloading random
sequences may not be the fasted way to go about things. However, this method
would provide a portable way to seed a pseudo
random number generator in a portable fashion for platforms that do not
have an entropy provider under /dev.