...Quite unsurpricingly but at the same time fascinating when you think of it and really ask your self "but why exactly?". I guess its a force of nature really. What we did was creating a histogram which is pretty much the Fourier transform, basically saying that any signal (stochastical or otherwise) can be broken down to a number (possibly infinite as in the case of square waves) of sinusoidals. In our case, I guess the "sinusoidals" were stochastical signals, simultainiously strectching in all possible directions but projected onto a vector in a six dimensional universe - the dice ;-)...
Fascinating point indeed; I never thought of a histogram as a Fourier transform, but then I'm an engineer rather than a mathematician... Of course the histogram shows only the magnitude, so I suspect the randomness gets squeezed into the (not-depicted) phase component of the transform.
Some interesting reading on the NIST's standards for RNG;
(gasp!) Christmas came early this year! Thanks, I actually needed a reviewed and accepted entropy measurement methodology recently -- I don't know why I didn't think of going to NIST at the time....
Well let us know how your noise generate works, and most importantly, how it's sequences test out. Cutlass' zener mention makes me wonder if you could use a 3v zener and an appropriate amp and feed it into an a/d pin and get an acceptable similar noise result. Then again I suspect part of all this circuitry is that the components (zener/transistor) aren't designed to be noisy, they're designed to be quiet, and so the gains needed might cause the amps to saturate on non-random ambient signals picked up, but maybe my concerns in that regard are unfounded.