[aerobatic]

gsyme -

ok.. lets say i was being over paranoid about the assumed quality of the thermal noise. i'll come down on that argument and agree that i was overegging that bit - in part to play devil's advocate.. after reading a lot more from you guys and the web, im now happy that thermal noise can be a good source of entropy.

but.. lets think about the implementation we're discussing here for a minute... if the thermal noise that pokerstars was using was guaranteed to be completely random then there'd be no point in hashing it with the mousemovement data and other user input to make it somehow EVEN MORE random, dont you agree with that logic? so there must be some reason why theyre doing that that means they dont entirely trust the thermal noise entropy on its own.

they also say on their web site that they utilise a PRNG as well.. so its not clear why they'd do that unless they were somehow not getting the results (performance? quality? unclear what) out of their thermal noise and mousemovements generators. dont you agree that there must be some reason why they do that, that they havnt explained?

im not being paranoid, im just being inquisitive and playing devil's advocate.

the whole thrust of my posts, which no one seems to discuss or question, is that a high quality prng thats well implemented is going to shuffle cards extremely well and as well as a claimed truly random source.. and that no one has visibility into the cards that are shuffled, with either method. thus you shouldnt somehow trust a trng any more than a prng when it comes to a shuffled deck. it makes not the slightest bit of difference to the shuffled deck or the end users who are playing cards wth that deck.