| “
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Having
once toiled as a spreadsheet designer (engineer
my card read), I can appreciate the significance of this- if not
entirely understand it.
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Random numbers are invaluable. They’re used in the encryption that
makes online banking secure. Economists, physicists, pollsters, and
casinos rely on them. Yet until recently, producing large sets of truly
random digits has been hard to do.
[...]
The age of computers solved all of this, right? Wrong. The best that
CPUs can generate are pseudo-random numbers, churned out by running a
seed number through a complex algorithm, then running the solution
through the same operation over and over again. However, anyone who
uncovers the algorithm and seed can generate the same sequence of
number.
[Here's the WTF part]
But now scientists at the Australian National University have
introduced a technique for generating 5.7 billion truly random values
per second. They do it by harnessing the fundamental uncertainty of the
universe. Their technique measures quantum phenomena in a box
completely devoid of photons, where ghostly virtual particles randomly
burble in and out of existence 24/7. “God does not play dice,” Einstein
famously quipped in response to evidence that randomness rules the
cosmos. Luckily, he was wrong.
[Full]
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They've been able to generate "true" random numbers using line noise for ages. Probably not 5.7 billion/sec of them.
ReplyDeleteMy first thought upon reading this was "cool". My second, "does it have applicable value?" As an aside, quantum computers, if made practical, will make cracking encryption easy, as intractable problems will become solvable in polynomial time. That's the bad news. The good news is quantum encryption is now possible, where using the ability of quantum particles to change state when viewed to alert the message owner of eavesdropping. This has already been tested with cellphones. Amazing future we're building. Drummermanrick
ReplyDeleteIf you live in a big city, the last 4 digits of telephone numbers "work". In high school, we calculated PI to a few decimal points by plotting thousands of these numbers to see whether they fell within the first quadrant of the unit circle. The ratio should be a quarter PI. Of course, that would be a lot easier now using a computer program with its pseudo random numbers and letting it crunch the numbers.
ReplyDeleteFreddie Sykes
Random and meaningless noise is much easier to produce; just ask a Liberal their opinion on anything.
ReplyDeleteRandom is good.
ReplyDeleteQuestion you need to ask is: How random?
One coin flip is good enough for the NFL.
Pseudo-random generators are good enough for valid models.
Phone books are good enough for the lottery.
Any group of numbers is good enough for AGW models,
since any input produces a hockey-stick output.
As a crypto tech in the Navy, one piece of gear I worked on actually had a long-lived beta source to use as the initial key generator.
ReplyDeleteKellyFromMesquite
"They do it by harnessing the fundamental uncertainty of the universe."
ReplyDeleteThe answer is always 42
thoR~
Random numbers are needed for secure cryptography, Drummermanrick.
ReplyDeleteYou use them as seed values for keys used to hash things to be encrypted, and you can use a large book of random numbers to make 100% unbreakable one-use encryption pads.
For one use pads, both sides have the same pad. You use a part of the pad to encrypt the message, and delete the part used.
The person getting the massage used the same part of his pad to decrypt, and then also deletes that part.
Continue using said pad for messages until you run out of pad. Then you need to get a new pad and copy to replace them.
Sorry, thoR, but according to Thornton Melon the answer is "4?"
ReplyDeleteFreddie Sykes
How to get a fair result from tossing a biased coin :-
ReplyDeleteToss it twice, if the result is HH or TT start again. The probabilities of HT and TH are equal and so can be used to get a fair result.