My grandma has dice and coins (and a calculator and a computer). Where are you drawing the line, I don’t understand your line.
I used your prof’s method in a number of instances (I used to play RPG a lot). Except that I used the penultimate digit instead of the last one, since the last one being even or odd depends on the page you check (left or right).
Do you have a source for that? If so, we’d appreciate it over here.
Yes, this is one major flaw in using the OP’s method exactly as described.
I would think that using the last (or next-to-last) digit of “randomly chosen” phone numbers out of a phone book would be a better method than using “randomly chosen” page numbers—assuming that all ten digits are equally likely to appear as the last digit of a phone number, which seems reasonable but I don’t know for sure.
I don’t know what you mean by “map 6-0 as 1-5.” For your first digit, you could map 5-9 as 0-4 or discard them. For your second digit, you can’t do any such “mapping.” Even if you needed a random number from 1 to 44, it wouldn’t be fair to do such “mapping,” because then the numbers 40-44 would each have twice as many chances to appear as any of the others.
For generation of just a few random bits, this idea seems the best to me. The only problem is, if you want to generate more random digits, you really can’t do so immediately; human bias as to how long to wait before re-looking will creep in, at a level significant in terms of quantizing the result into seconds.
How to solve this problem? Perhaps get a stopwatch with the ability to spit out time at an interval so fine-grained that you couldn’t possibly expect human bias to matter so far as the least-significant digit goes.
Come to think of it, you are right. I may be misremembering. This was years ago. Second to last number might have been it.
This is a big assumption that I am not sure I am comfortable making. It would be great if someone in the telco industry had an answer. This might merit its own thread.
The stopwatch method I have used. Hundredths of a second is all it takes (at least for my slow reaction times) to be close enough to random.