A Network of Generators, Running Since 1998

The project extends the Princeton laboratory's reasoning to a global scale. If a single operator can nudge a random generator, the argument runs, then perhaps the attention of very large numbers of people focused on one event at one moment might nudge many generators at once. To test it, Roger Nelson established a network of hardware random number generators, referred to within the project as eggs, hosted at sites in dozens of countries, each producing a continuous stream of bits and reporting them to a central archive. The network has run without interruption since 1998 and the archive is public. The analysis proceeds by designating an event, specifying a window of time around it, and asking whether the network's combined output during that window departs from expectation more than it should.

Events in the registry have included New Year celebrations, major disasters, funerals watched worldwide and the attacks of September 2001. The project reports that the accumulated departures across the whole event series are large enough to be very unlikely by chance. The hardware itself is unremarkable and that is deliberate: each node is a small commercial noise-based generator, chosen so that the network's behaviour cannot be attributed to any exotic property of one device. The interest is entirely in what happens when many ordinary devices are read together.