We study the problem of extracting a prescribed number of random bits by
reading the smallest possible number of symbols from non-ideal stochastic
processes. The related interval algorithm proposed by Han and Hoshi has
asymptotically optimal performance; however, it assumes that the distribution
of the input stochastic process is known. The motivation for our work is the
fact that, in practice, sources of randomness have inherent correlations and
are affected by measurement's noise. Namely, it is hard to obtain an accurate
estimation of the distribution. This challenge was addressed by the concepts of
seeded and seedless extractors that can handle general random sources with
unknown distributions. However, known seeded and seedless extractors provide
extraction efficiencies that are substantially smaller than Shannon's entropy
limit. Our main contribution is the design of extractors that have a variable
input-length and a fixed output length, are efficient in the consumption of
symbols from the source, are capable of generating random bits from general
stochastic processes and approach the information theoretic upper bound on
efficiency.Comment: 2 columns, 16 page
