Resources and documentation related to the KZG Marble machine.
This machine was built by Xofee in order to generate randomness to participate in the KZG ceremony. It uses chaos theory to capture entropy. The KZG Marble Machine is a physical device that generates random numbers using the natural randomness of marble movement.
The KZG Ceremony is a public ritual aimed at providing a cryptographic foundation for Ethereum scaling efforts like proto-danksharding.
If you want more information about the KZG Ceremony, you can find it on the dedicated GitHub Pages. To see the machine in operation, go to this video.
The machine is a marble circuit. There are 13 obstacles retracing in chronological order the history of Ethereum:
- White paper
- First blocks
- Attacks
- NFT madness
- Maze of the DEFI
- The Burn
- Mining area
- The Merge
- Flow of staking
- Layers 2
- Data Blob
- Vision of the future
- Rocket lift
A complete description of each obstacle can be found in the file Full-presentation.md
Thanks to a set of sensors, it measures the time between marbles, and it is also sensitive to its external environment.
Each time a ball completes the course, it is detected by a sensor. This causes a measurement on all the other sensors and also some light animations. These values are aggregated and then output in one random number via USB.
Some obstacles are mechanical or motorized with servomotors. The latter also serves as a sensor to add entropy. The course is embellished with animated LEDs to make it more entertaining. The public present in front of the machine also participates in the entropy thanks to the microphone, light sensor and the ultrasonic sensor which measures the distance of the public from the machine.
To contribute to the KZG ceremony, the machine will directly generate a new long string of random values which will be used as a secret. This secret will not be recorded and will therefore be lost after participation.
This special contribution for the KZG ceremony will take place after mid-March.
The KZG Marble Machine uses a physical process to generate randomness, which means it is not subject to the same potential biases and patterns that can be present in pseudorandom number generators. This can provide a higher level of security in applications where true randomness is essential.
The KZG Marble Machine is a physical device, which means it is more resistant to tampering than a software-based random number generator. If an attacker wants to manipulate the output of the KZG Marble Machine, they would need to physically access the device and interfere with the marbles, which can be more difficult than manipulating software.
- It took a total of more than 8 days of 3D printing to make all the pieces.
- A marble is detected by the sensor on average every 2.5s
- It takes about 25s for a ball to complete the full course.
- There are 42 marbles in the circuit in total, 30 of which are in the elevator.
- The course measures more than 4m in total.
- The longest obstacle is the DEFI maze which alone represents a quarter of the course.
You can find more info about the machine in the file Full-presentation.md.
A data set of more than 16,000 values generated by the machine (CSV file available in raw, hexadecimal or binary) is available. You can use them as random values in your projects or analyze them to check that the machine is not biased.
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me on twitter at Xofee.
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