random flash 24 corruption of randomness

I don't need suggestions of how to do it in AS3, or any other system, or server side, only AS2 - using only what's available in the standard APIs. I cannot rely on having sufficient script access to use ExternalInterface to get hold of things like the user agent, or the URL of the page. Think of it this way: there is a certain chance that two people will generate the same random number sequence using only Math.random(), but the chance of two people generating the same sequence and having, say, the exact same list of fonts is significantly lower.

What I need isn't something perfectly random, just something that is random enough to dilute the randomness I get from Math.random().

AS3 also has Font.enumerateFonts, and a few other things that are different from system to system. In ActionScript 3.0 I use the value returned by System.totalMemory as a bit of extra randomness, but there's no equivalent in ActionScript 2.0. However, in ActionScript 2.0 it's not easy, and I'm seeing more and more collisions, so I wonder if there is something I've overlooked.Īs far as I can tell the problem with Math.random() is that it's seeded by the system time, and when you have sufficient numbers of simultaneous attempts there are quite a few collisions. For a long time I've known that the random number generator in Flash is't random enough to generate sufficiently unique IDs, so I've employed a number of tricks to get even more random numbers. I write a piece of software that runs inside banner ads which generates millions of session IDs every day.

Random flash 24 corruption of randomness