The Global Consciousness Project

Not sure what you refer to when you say "field". Can you briefly elaborate?

,,, because my sense is that this potentially connected to a spiritual or metaphysical "field", which is of course not necessarily  an electromagnetic thing, and doesn't just impact analog circuits. It is probably more pervasive than that, and could just as easily function on either side of the analog/digital system boundary.

Yes, I think I agree. The "naive" idea would be that the field was somehow acting on the hardware to modify the raw output, and the problem was whether that effect could survive the processing with the XOR masks, in such a way as to produce a correlation in the final output recorded in the database. Essentially the answer was that it couldn't, because even if (for one type of RNG) there was a way in principle for certain patterns in the raw output to produce correlations in the final output, the computers weren't synchronised closely enough for it to work.

But we don't know how psi effects work anyway. Why shouldn't they modify the final output rather than the raw output, and why shouldn't they take into account the lack of synchronisation as well?