Using Lasers To Generate Random Numbers Faster

Pranav writes "Using semiconductor lasers, scientists from Takushoku University, Saitama University, and NTT Corporation achieved random number rates of up to 1.7 gigabits per second, which is about 10 times higher than the second-best rate, produced using a physical phenomenon. Future work may center on devising laser schemes that can achieving rates as high as 10 Gbps."

Comments

Re:A Solution in Search of a Problem

[hweimer]

Has anyone out there actually had their system bottlenecked by lack of random numbers?

I know some guys doing quantum Monte Carlo simulations. And yes, fast RNGs are crucial for their algorithms.

Don't believe everything you read

[Frequency Domain]

First off, this is old news -- the article is copyright 2007.

Next, the article claims...

Generating random numbers using physical sources -- which can be as simple as coin-flipping and tossing dice -- are preferred over other methods, such as computer generation, because they yield nearly ideal random numbers: those that are unpredictable, unreproducible, and statistically unbiased.

This is garbage -- there are applications where people prefer physical sources, but those of us doing simulation work realized long ago that good algorithmic sources are far better for our needs: 1) It's mighty hard to debug a complex simulation model without reproducibility; 2) You can use the reproducibility to induce covariance between runs, greatly reducing the standard error of your estimates for a given sampling effort; 3) The distributions of algorithmically generated pseudo-random numbers are provably uniform, whereas for physical sources the best you know is that they haven't (yet) failed a hypothesis test for uniformity. Finally, the last statement about being "statistically unbiased" is utter nonsense -- unbiasedness is a property of an estimator, not a distribution.