Slashdot Mirror
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."
the generation of random number is too important to be left to chance.
Lets play a game, what XKCD am I thinking of?
always been one of my favorites... http://xkcd.org/221/
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.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Brilliant! Just assign a bit based on whether or not it works in a given Ubuntu release!
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.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
How is an infinite stream of 0s random?
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.