RFC2777 Gateway Form

NOTE: RFC 2777 has been superceded by RFC 3797. This service has been discontinued.

For an online implementation of RFC 3797 please see Verifiable Random Selection (RFC 3797).

This form lets you run the RFC2777 algorithm (source code publicly available in the RFC itself) through a Web interface. It's an online method for making random draw/selections in such a way that the unbiased nature of the choice is publicly verifiable (that is, repeatable).

To give you a simple example of the principle behind this: if you have to draw a coin publicly to make a public choice between 2 options, you can either :

assemble witnesses physically in a room and draw your coin in front of them. Doing that online, even with video, is challenging, and challengeable too (you know, visual effects..)
or you can say (online) that your draw/choice is directly linked to the atomspheric pressure somewhere in a week for now (that nobody knows in advance to the digit of course), e.g. whether this pressure is going to be an odd or an even number.

This form does the same except it lets you order a list of values randomly, not just decide between 2 options, so it needs more sources and a hash function.

Just enter the values in the fields, the first one being the number of ordered values you want to end up with (.e.g 2 if you want to simulate a coin draw)

Size of pool (max 255):

Random Number #1: (e.g. Standard & Poor's 500 index for the reference day: 1249.43)

Random Number #2: (e.g. Massachusetts Lottery "Numbers" game for the reference day: e.g., 8.4.7.0)

Random Number #3: (e.g., Sea level atmospheric pressure in hectopascals in San Jose, California for the reference day: e.g., 1024).

Note: For a pool size of N, the calculator returns a list of size N - 1. The list of resulting integers is the RFC2777 ordering of the initial set of values (minus the position of the initial value that appears last in the sorted list).

List of Accesskeys Defined for this Form text input field: s Pool Size; 1 Randomness Source #1; 2 Randomness Source #2; 3 Randomness Source #3

Author: Daniel Dardailler danield@w3.org.

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