New Method for Random Number Generation Developed

Science Daily is reporting that a German team has developed a new method of random number generation that they hope will improve security. "The German team has now developed a true random number generator that uses an extra layer of randomness by making a computer memory element, a flip-flop, twitch randomly between its two states 1 or 0. Immediately prior to the switch, the flip-flop is in a 'metastable state' where its behavior cannot be predicted. At the end of the metastable state, the contents of the memory are purely random. The researchers' experiments with an array of flip-flop units show that for small arrays the extra layer makes the random number almost twenty times more 'random' than conventional methods."

Comments

This is a random comment.

[MillionthMonkey]

uixon8wg2gvw

Re:This is a random comment.

[MillionthMonkey]

Your grandmother can generate non-alphanumeric random characters?

Man, no wonder you're here.

Re:This is a random comment.

[Anonymous Coward]

He's here because his grandmother can generate babies.

Re:This is a random comment.

[TheCarp]

Still? Damn, my mother can't even do that anymore. I don't even want to think about my 87 year old grandmother giving it a try.

Re:This is a random comment.

[nabsltd]

2 to the 9'th is 256, so most random sequences would not have had 9 sequential results in a row.

In a world where 2^9 = 256, absolutely anything can happen.

generation of random numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

the generation of random number is too important to be left to chance.

Why not use the ultimate random number generator?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just pull random slashdot threads at -1 and hash that. Can't get more random than that.

XKCD Bait

[jgtg32a]

Lets play a game, what XKCD am I thinking of?

obligatory xkcd

[fuo]

always been one of my favorites... http://xkcd.org/221/

Re:WiFi

[DoofusOfDeath]

I always thought the WiFi radio in laptops would be a good thing for generating random numbers.

Brilliant! Just assign a bit based on whether or not it works in a given Ubuntu release!

Re:Why not use the ultimate random number generato

[BarryJacobsen]

So your suggestion is to generate a random with a random? How do you get the random slashdot thread?

From the previous random, duh!

Re:20 times more random?

[TheCarp]

Actually Bruce only has a 50% chance of getting the answer in 0.019 seconds. Chuck Norris however just hits the researcher with a round house so hard that his grandmother spits out the answer, 100% of the time.

Re:Obligatory Dilbert

[Martin Blank]

For those of us whose systems block the Wayback machine as an anonymizer, you might try http://dilbert.com/2001-10-25/ instead. (They started putting pretty much all of the old Dilberts online a few months ago.)

Re:meh, Schrödingers bit

[Dunbal]

The only problem with the cat was they have 9 lives. No wonder we always kept getting live cats when we opened the box.

Re:Obligatory TheDailyWTF

[danlip]

Obilgatory TheDailyWTF

Re:Random today, but still random tomorrow?

[Dancindan84]

Question: why not simply use the random crap we all have on our PCs to generate random numbers? Say...choose 5 folders at random on a PC.

To understand recursion one must first understand recursion.

Re:Hardware?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a little box with a Mexican jumping bean in it.

Re:WiFi

[omuls are tasty]

How is an infinite stream of 0s random?

Re:This Is What's Wrong With Slashdot

[Tetsujin]

Would you prefer tits or GTFO?

I'd prefer tits.