Truily Random Numbers

Gary Larsen                                                                                  SCIENCE TRULY RANDOM NUMBERS “ Having once toiled as a spreadsheet designer (engineer my card read), I can appreciate the significance of this- if not entirely understand it. 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] ”