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True Random Number Generator Goes Online
amigoro writes "A 'true' random number generator that relies on the unpredictable quantum process of photon emission has gone online providing academic and scientific community access to true random numbers free of charge."
Hasn't random.org done this for a while already? Perhaps they don't have academic backing, but I do believe they use numbers generated by atomic decay.
True random number generators have been around in hardware form for a while based on a number of different processes, not quantum only. But this is being offered to the community at large, who may not have the means to procure or pay for a hardware solution.
This is neat but there have been other quantum random number generators online for years. This one by id Quantique springs to mind... I'm not sure what this new service provides that others don't. If you REALLY want secure random numbers you should buy a QRNG PCI card and make them yourself so you're the only one with a copy.
Atmospheric noise
Lava lamps
Radioactive decay
Entropy
Not really the hardest of encryptions to crack.
..OMG, did anyone see that to register you haveto solve a math problem like:
derivative of (5*sin 3x +6cos(-pi/2))
Nice!
Here is a direct link to the generator, you can
download the client from here as well:
http://random.irb.hr/
QRand Command-line Utility [v0.2, 2007-07-17]
Note 1: Compiles under Visual Studio and g++.
Note 2: Windows executable included.
Note 3: GNU Linux executable included.
Manuals are your last resort only
That joke would have been a lot funnier if you had cited your source (which, by the way, is required by xkcd's cc license).
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Your mother a math teacher or a PhD?
My mother doesn't even know what a sine is, let alone solve that to 15*cos(3x)
Manuals are your last resort only
For scientific research, there's a very good reason to use pseudo-random numbers: reproducibility.
If you're analyzing a stochastic model, you want to be able to generate lots of runs with different random sequences and gather statistics from the ensemble. But if you see interesting behavior in a particular run and want to take a closer look, you want to be able to go back and run it again, exactly as it happened the first time. In this case, you don't want real randomness, you want pseudo-randomness with good statistical properties. I'm currently checking through my code to make sure you can do just that when using this tool.
That would be Lavarand from, oh, just 10 years ago.
Rich
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
Great, now you're going to get yourself sued by the MPAA for randomly guessing their new encryption key!
The intuitive disconnect here is that humans have a well-documented inability to understand or true randomness. By true randomness, I mean in a mathematical sense: uniformly distributed values over some range, with each value independent from the next (uncorrelated). Just try it: whatever you come up with, whether it be some algorithm, hardware, whatever — it will probably fail all the statistical tests for true randomness. And if it can't pass those tests, then it will be useless for most of the applications that one needs random things for... simulations, encryption, authentication, etc. And mind you, even if one can pass all the existing tests with some method, it doesn't mean that someone will invent a new statistical test tomorrow that the method will fail spectacularly. Like many apparently simple problems, random number generation is surprisingly deep and very, very difficult to do right.
[B.v.L]
> Actually, a random number generator isn't really random unless it is possible
> for it to generate the number 42 a thousand times in a row...
> Not so.
> A random number generator might generate numbers in the range 0x10000000 to
> 0xfffffff0 (and thus never generate 42 (0x0000002a) as a result). As long as
> the distribution within that range is uniform, non-periodic, and lacking in
> underlying structure, it's random. If it meets the first and last requirement
> but is periodic, then it's pseudo-random.
Actually so!
Your range theory is a misunderstanding of RNG (true or pseudo). To restrict the range of values output is simply a matter of interpreting the bitsream in whatever way you choose.
I could take any bitstream and get numbers either integer 1 and integer 2, and no other values allowed, but that doesn't mean the RNG is limited. Thats just my algorithm stripping all but the last bit and adding one, or whatever way I choose to restrict the range of numbers. That process has nothing to do with the underlying RNG and its randomness.
So long as your selection method for the bytes was sufficiently arbitrary
As long as it was fairly random, one might say...
You see the problem?
Get your own free personal location tracker
Because then your own psychology comes into play.
If you ask people to pick a number between 1 and 10, the vast majority of them won't pick 1 or 10. People just don't like the edges. I think that they avoid 5, too, because it's right smack in the middle. For a number between 1 and 10 to be random, most people subconsciously want to make it not stand out and will pick something like 3, 6, or 8, thus not making it even random enough for gaming.
Also, in the same vein of not standing out, if you ask people to pick multiple numbers between 1 and 10, most won't allow there to be any patterns in them in the attempt to make them more random, thus actually making them less random. For example, if you ask people to pick five numbers, most won't pick something like 4, 4, 4, 4, and 4, even though it's a legitimate combination that's just as likely as something like 7, 3, 1, 1, 9.
Another example. When I was in high school, I used to play $5 in the lottery once a week, figuring that it sure would be convenient if I never had to bother going to college and get a job and so on. I usually just selected the quick pick and let the machine pick my numbers. Once, though, I manually picked 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 for the first ticket, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 for the second, and so on. My dad basically said, "You're an idiot. Those numbers will never come up, and you just wasted five dollars!" He never quite got it that, aside from the lottery being a colossal waste of money to begin with, it didn't matter what numbers I picked; any given set was just as likely to come up as any other given set. Not having six consecutive numbers is merely imposing human psychology on the random numbers, which could have very well been consecutive numbers.
If I'm not mistaken, several years ago, someone proved that the digits of pi are random. That if you expand it out to a bazillion decimal places, you'll eventually run across patterns like 0123456789 and such. As humans, with brains that are designed to seek out patterns, it strikes us as interesting, perhaps even as some sort of sign that the numbers aren't random. Nothing is further from the truth, though; the lack of such patterns would be a sure sign that the numbers aren't random.