Slashdot Mirror
Quantum Random Numbers For Download
PSUdaemon writes "The University of Geneva has produced a website that allows you to download truly random numbers generated from an Optical quantum random number generator. They will also be releasing a client API that you can use directly in your codes to download random numbers."
In other news, the Slashdot effect causes a 500-lightyear radius of spacetime to disappear into an Infinite Improbability Field.
Are they actually running the "Optical quantum random number generator" every time you click submit, or are they just pulling the numbers pre-generated from a database?
Read Here
It's only one click away from the first page.
Next you'll be telling us you know more that he does.
WHile this is cool, on the other hand we mainly need random numbers for two things. The first is to make algorithms which require random numbers to run correctly work and to make games interesting to play. For that kind of purpose this is overkill :)
The other reason we need them is for secure encryption purposes. If you felt paranoid enough to need quantumly generated random numbers, would you really get the numbers over the internet from an untrusted source?
What would be much more interesting would be if intel/AMD started including a random number generator directly on processors which allowed you to get some random numbers via some random process on chip.
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
generate a few screens of random numbers, use a range of 0-255 and generate 1000 numbers.
/dev/dsp
...
...
open up a text editor and paste the results in, repeat the process several times till you have a nice big file of random numbers. Then simply
%> cat randomnumbers.txt
its an interesting noise , i think you will agree
nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
At the macroscopic level, that's true, but at the quantum level the type of determinism you describe ("For everything there is an equation") breaks down. Consider Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: the more precisely the position is known, the less precisely the momentum can be known. Even with instruments advanced enough to measure one of these values with infinite precision, the other would be unknown, and no equation could be created to describe the particle's state. It could be anything, and there is no way to predict what its exact value will be.
This is very useful for true randomness, unlike the sack of blocks. If you measured the state of the blocks, you would find that they obey Newtonian mechanics, and you could predict which block was on top, given enough information about their state at some point and the forces acting upon them. With quantum particles, gathering that much information about the state is precluded by the laws of quantum physics, so the answer is effectively random.
However, yes... you can trust this to be random, and no, you can't trust it to "correctly destroy all of the information between here and there".
I don't believe that the intent of this is to do realworld crypto nor games (which is what other people are claiming the other "major" use of random numbers are). A set of purely random numbers is really only useful to people testing mathematic theories or other high math science work. For crypto, decent pseudo-random sequences (or the old "pull from an analog source" trick) is perfectly fine. This is overkill for realworld crypto (not to mention broadcast via the internet), which means that this is primarily useful - to math scientists.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
IT doesn't even hold up in macro worlds. Take a simple 2 body gravitational problem. Solvable since Newton's day. Add in a third body. Unsolvable. The fact that there are unsolvable macro occurences is the basis of chaos theory.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
There is. Google for Bell's inequality or the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen paradoxfor a starting point. It does involve some more than skin-deep knowledge of quantum mechanics though.
The bottom line is there's no theory of 'local hidden variables' that would make quantum mechanics a deterministic theory in the 'classical' sense.
Last I checked HotBits was still in the random number business, using some radioactive sources.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
that's a different kettle of fish. N-body problems are not analytically solvable. That does not make them 'random'. More to the point, you have a case in which accumulated imprecisions will lead (eventually) to a complete prediction failure. However, the equations of the theory are still deterministic - given the initial conditions with enough accuracy, you can predict (with some required accuracy) the final ones, at least for a given time interval. It's just that the more precision and longer time you want, the more precise your initial conditions have to be.
In quantum mechanics, there's no such 'eventually'. Example: set up an atom in an excited state and try to predict whether it will be in the same state after 1 minute - all you can say is "will be with some probability", hence no mechanical determinism here. You can also make the time interval as short as you like.
The EPR paradox, as modified by Bell, is actually a test of Quantum Mechanics - on the level of some basic assumptions, including the lack of classical determinism. It was tested (mostly in the '60-'70) and found to hold w.r.t. this issue (see Phys Rev Lett 49, 91) - were Bell's inequality to be found true, it would have meant the QM assumptions were wrong, making all QM wrong. Guess what, it didn't hold true ...
So, at least the general principles of QM are correct. What this means is that there are non-local effects embedded in the theory, which make a deterministic (and thus predictable, i.e. non-random) description impossible.
Yeah! this works great!
Array
(
[0] => 134
)
Looks pretty random to my eye.
"when life gets complicated, I like to take a nap in a tree and wait for dinner" - Hobbes.
i asked for one random number between 0 and 10000 and i got back my base rate salary.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
There are statistical tests (see Knuth), like spectral flatness and incompressibility, but complete "certainty" has to rest on the theoretical underpinnings of QM, with testing by Bell's inequality (discussed elsewhere on this page).
And what kinds of applications might they be used for?
Secure communications, ignoring for now the problem of distributing the random bits.
Why does it need to be a quantum random number generator? How come you cant use an aerial and pick up white noise?
That "white noise" is contaminated by a jumble of deterministic TV and radio signals, that potential attackers could also detect or predict. It would be better to detach the aerial and amplify the output from a warm resistor, which is I think what the VIA motherboards do. Conceivably, though, somebody with far too much time and money on their hands could watch (or have watched) the molecules in your resistor unreasonably closely, and attempt guessing what they'll do. Using smaller particles is better, since observing them perturbs them so that their behavior can't be predicted, but that's QM by definition. You (and VIA) could also argue that warm resistors already include lots of quantum noise.
If we were ants living on a Rubik's cube, differential geometry would be a little more confusing.