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."

Comments

lava lamps at SGI

[TheGratefulNet]

when I think of random numbers, I can't help but remember the 'fishbowl' that had at SGI (mtn view) where an indycam was photo'ing some lavalamps and creating random seeds based on those images.

ah, SGI....

Re:Don't misunderstand

[TheRaven64]

Don't Via C3 chips have a hardware random number generator, that uses quantum-level fluctuations in the chip (i.e. the kind of noise that most of the rest of the chip is specifically designed to try to avoid) to produce noise as output? Since these cost under $100, I can't see a researcher not being able to afford one. You obviously can't use this service for cryptography, since relying on someone else for your entropy is just asking for trouble.

Re:random.org ?

[lawpoop]

I do believe they use numbers generated by atomic decay. The site claims that

The randomness comes from atmospheric noise... I wonder, how could you know that their numbers are truly random, as they claim?

Re:Wait...

[AchiIIe]

Bah, you must be a mathematician.
If you put a monkey in front of a typewriter and he types on it for an infinite amount of time, he'll eventually type all of Shakespeare's work.

It's called the Infinite monkey theorem

Ignoring punctuation, spacing, and capitalization, a monkey typing letters uniformly at random has one chance in 26 of correctly typing the first letter of Hamlet. It has one chance in 676 (26 times 26) of typing the first two letters. Because the probability shrinks exponentially, at 20 letters it already has only one chance in 26^20 = 19,928,148,895,209,409,152,340,197,376, roughly equivalent to the probability of buying 4 lottery tickets consecutively and winning the jackpot each time. In the case of the entire text of Hamlet, the probabilities are so vanishingly small they can barely be conceived in human terms. The text of Hamlet, even stripped of punctuation, contains well over 130,000 letters which would lead to a probability of one in 3.4×10^183946.

For comparison purposes, there are only about 10^79 atoms in the observable universe and only 4.3 x 10^17 seconds have elapsed since the Big Bang. Even if the universe were filled with monkeys typing for all time, their total probability to produce a single instance of Hamlet would still be less than one chance in 10183800. As Kittel and Kroemer put it, "The probability of Hamlet is therefore zero in any operational sense of an event...", and the statement that the monkeys must eventually succeed "gives a misleading conclusion about very, very large numbers." This is from their textbook on thermodynamics, the field whose statistical foundations motivated the first known expositions of typing monkeys

Re:Captchas require calculus

[E 99]

Look at the signup page. You not only need to prove that you are a human but also that you have elementary knowledge of calculus.

I propose adding this to the /. signup process.