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Thursday, July 6, 2017
New: Decide Utility
New at Fourmilab, Decide is a Unix utility, written in Perl, which helps you make decisions with the aid of (pseudo)random numbers from HotBits, the system's /dev/urandom generator, or, if none of the previous two are available, Perl's built-in rand() function. Based upon the name by which it is invoked and/or options on the command line, Decide can respond with a “Yes” or “No” answer, a binary 1 or 0, one of the twenty responses of the Magic 8-Ball, or with the result of a dice roll specified in the dice notation used by role-playing and war games, including algebraic expressions involving multiple dice throws and constants. By default, data from the HotBits pseudorandom generator are used, but if you obtain a HotBits API Key, you can base your decisions on radioactively-generated true random numbers. Decide is intended to run on Unix-like systems. Whether it works on other systems which provide an implementation of Perl depends how faithfully the system implements the LWP::Simple Web access module and the /dev/urandom pseudorandom generator. Complete documentation and a link to download the utility are available on the Decide home page.Posted at
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