Labourcastle is now not only home of the Marble Bookkeeper, the hilariously overcomplicated adding machine, but also of the DNG. It takes signals from a pressure plate close to the meeting hall and converts those into somewhat unpredictable numbers (with anything but dwarfs, the numbers may be random, but what they produce are certainly Drunk Numbers). The 'randomiser' is a simple track bit with loops on both sides, when a signal is received, both loops are made accessible, and the cart drunkenly chooses one of them. The bits generated are then stored in the order of their generation. There are eight bit storage cells for the randomiser, storing a pair of four-bit numbers.
The randomiser doesn't take the input directly, because otherwise there can occur nasty cases of signal overlap, when both 'outputs' are on for a while, causing false positives or negatives in the counter/storer. I added an extra relay circuit which waits until the randomiser sends a proper 'off' signal before accepting new input and even waits for an 'off' from the signal generating pressure plate (since basically, the bit generated is a function of the previous bit and the time that passed between the last signal and the new one, running right into a 'lingering' on signal from a held pressure plate would generate a 100% non-random bit; factually non-random bits still happen when the cart encounters a waiting 'off' and the plate switches on while the cart moves from there to the 'on' check, but these occurrences are fairly rare).
Generating a pair of Drunk Numbers takes between four and five days usually, more if the plate is occupied by a child that watches its mother drink (no new input for several days). I noted down ten pairs of numbers generated from late Slate to mid-Hematite:
Binary Hexadecimal
1001 1100 9 C
1011 1110 B E
1000 0011 8 3
0100 0000 4 0
0000 0101 0 5
1100 0000 C 0
1000 0101 8 5
0100 1111 4 F
1011 0100 B 4
1101 0001 D 1
How many calls does it take to give some preliminary evaluation of a number generator? A few hundred? A thousand? Should only take ~15 dwarf years...
Constructions: pressure plate, relay/regulator, randomiser, counter 1, four latches, four memory cells (must be cycled, switching the memory off before each new run), counter2/transmitter, four 'settable' binary memory cells, which get _set_ to the current Drunk Number, i.e. the old one is simply overwritten. The second counter/memory array uses less material and can be run without extra levers thanks to the overwriting feature, but needs a well-sorted input; it got screwed over quite badly by the naturally poor manners of the unmodified randomiser, causing me to construct the relay/regulator.
Author
Topic: What's going on in your fort? (Read 6194371 times)