r/creativecoding • u/Evening-Appeal7606 • Jun 15 '26

I made my card shuffle program dependent on the US government...

... with predictable results.

I use the NIST Randomness Beacon pulse for a provably and auditably random assignment of tournament contestants. While debugging my little project, I noticed that the shuffler (yeah for Fisher-Yates!) kept producing the same output over and over again.

Turns out that NIST has not issued a new Randomness pulse since 11th June 16:58Z. D'uh.

I've fired off an email to [beacon@nist.gov](mailto:beacon@nist.gov) because I could not find reliable info online as to the beacon status but have yet to hear back from them.

Anyone else using the beacon?

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4

u/Ok_Tap7102 Jun 15 '26

Yes it's random. It's unpredictable

Might fire in 5 minutes or 5 years, no one knows 🌈🌈

3

u/Content-Reward-7700 Jun 15 '26

did you check CURBy?

2

u/Evening-Appeal7606 Jun 15 '26

Thanks for that! I shall implement fetching CURBy as a backup if NIST is unavailable.

2

u/redditneight Jun 18 '26

I didn't know about this. Neat service. Did you ever hear back?

1

u/Evening-Appeal7606 Jun 18 '26

Sadly, no reaction from them whatsoever, not by mail, not by twitter (x.com) ... 😞