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Physicist Uses Laser Light As Fast, True-Random Number Generator
MrKevvy writes
"An Ottawa physicist is using laser light to create truly random numbers much faster than other methods do, with obvious potential benefits to cryptography: 'Sussman's Ottawa lab uses a pulse of laser light that lasts a few trillionths of a second. His team shines it at a diamond. The light goes in and comes out again, but along the way, it changes. ... It is changed because it has interacted with quantum vacuum fluctuations, the microscopic flickering of the amount of energy in a point in space. ... What happens to the light is unknown — and unknowable. Sussman's lab can measure the pulses of laser light that emerge from this mysterious transformation, and the measurements are random in a way that nothing in our ordinary surroundings is. Those measurements are his random numbers.'"
Finally a reason for socially inept people to buy diamonds!
The world's smartest bug zapper www.zapstats.com/kickstarter
9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 ....
You don't KNOW it's not random...
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
I don't believe such a thing can possibly exist.
Of course they can. Here: 7, 3. I've just given you two *totally* random numbers.
I mean, what about a diamond in the middle attack? If you manage to replace it with well known and tweaked diamond, with known quantum effect (you see, i could use funny words too), then all the systems would be jeopardized.
Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/221/
I just use the rand() function in Excel. Way less hassle than firing a laser through a diamond...
"the measurements are random in a way that nothing in our ordinary surroundings is"
Nonsense. They are random in precisely the same way that a good bouncy roll of the dice are. They are random in precisely the same way that a temperature measurement of a cup full of boiling water 10 seconds after it is poured is. They are random in precisely the same way that the sound coming out of a piezoelectric microphone taped to a car window travelling at 60 MPH is. They are random in precisely the same way that the noise of a reverse-biased silicon junction is.
Perhaps the author meant to say "the measurements are random in a way that no pseudorandom number generator algorithm is."
Finally a reason for socially inept people to buy diamonds!
I dunno about that. Diamond video cards were okay.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
The newspaper article is not giving any information that is not already included in the summary.
The paper is published in Optics Express, the abstract can be read here. The full article is behind a paywall unfortunately. The author claim that this concept could deliver random numbers at a rate of 100 GHz which is quite fast compared to other true random number generators out there that are based on thermal noise, radiation or other processes.
Do not look at random numbers with remaining eye.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
That's the point though--just because we don't have an explanation doesn't make it random--it may be apparently random, but that irks me in the same way that people drop off the "known-" or "observable-" in front of "universe".
Also "securely random" implies an application for which these "apparently random" numbers are "good enough"...
A while back, the Simtec Entropy Key was making the rounds among Debian Devs, and claims to be exploiting quantum effects in the P-N junctions to be a true RNG.
They seem serious and I tend to trust paranoid Debian developers' opinions, but ultimately I don't have enough knowledge myself to make a confident judgment call. I'd be curious about more opinions.
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
A lot of tools have diamond blades.
Unlike easily predicted phenomena like radioactive decay and thermal noise?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Incorrectly applying the conservation of information. What you are saying wouldn't work and would violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. What would happen is as you did the measurements to that degree you would lose information on the motion of the particles involved as you gained the new information on the position hence the conservation of information. The uncertainty of the choices would still exist and you'd most likely get two different results if his choice had any quantum affects involved.
Of course they can. Here: 7, 3. I've just given you two *totally* random numbers.
Nope. And I can prove it. Both of your numbers were between 0 and 9, inclusive. Counting only integers that makes ten possibilities. Now, between 10 and 999, inclusive, there are nine hundred ninety possibilities. Since random numbers are equally likely that means that it is ninety-nine times more likely for a random number to be between 10 and 999, inclusive, than it is for them to be between 0 and 9, inclusive. Successive probabilities multiply, so the likelihood that two numbers chosen at random will be between 10 and 999 inclusive are 8991 times more likely than that they will be between 0 and 9, inclusive. The only reasonable conclusion is that 7 and 3 are not random numbers.
~Loyal
p.s. I think if you search the literature you'll find that 3 is, in fact, a random number. Therefore you problem lies with the 7.
I aim to misbehave.
A Heiselber's Uncertainty Principle attacks!
It says "hello"!
It is very effective!
That was what Einstein thought. So he set up a thought experiment to prove that quantum was only apparently random, called the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky paradox. Turned out, after Aspect ran the experiment, that Einstein was wrong. Reality was more random than he thought. It still might be the case that there's an order behind the quantum randomness, but that's currently more an article of faith than scientific insight.
The term "random" is generally (even in science, from what I know of it) taken to refer to things which we are not able to predict, even theoretically. We do not, however, know for sure if the system is non-deterministic (that is, truly random) or only apparently so.
Again, not a quantum physicist. But I believe that is the general state of affairs. See Wikipedia for more.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.
Ian Ameline
The Commodore 64 could produce random numbers by sampling the white noise generator in the SID audio chip. They probably weren't as random as shining a laser through the diamond but I wonder if the difference is enough to matter...
I knew you were going to say that.
Wow, for one integer to be picked is infinitely rare, but two?!?! And both positive primes near zero... Wait a tic... those have all the markings of a psychologically random number! Sadly, it's impossible to say that's how they were selected, as they're just as likely to occur as anything else from a uniformly distributed random number generator over all possible numbers. Only Laplace's demon knows for sure...
Oh yeah baby... back with my VLB Diamond Viper 4MB of VRAM... and a 486DX-2 66 with 16MB I was styling'. The chicks just couldn't stay away.
You must have been rolling in the dough back then to have 16MB ram. 8MB about broke my bank.
Yeah I was a spoiled brat.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Okay, fair enough. Is there any basis for this belief other than that you like it to be the case that the universe is deterministic? I sometimes like the universe to be a lollypop. It seldomly is. I'm saying this just to be an ass I guess, but still: why would this belief of yours be valuable, if it is backed by fact nor theory? Many people like to believe that a supreme being exists that wants to be friends with them. Is your belief in that category, or is there more to it?
The full paper (link by "Vario" above) seems to indicate that they get random bits, i.e. coin tosses, and claim that they can get a uniform distribution (i.e. 0.5). They also say that "Any possible bias in the phase measurement is removed by post-processing using a fair bit extractor algorithm", citing two papers* (i.e. that though their measurements could lead to a slightly different distribution, they can correct for that). I'm not familiar with the technique, but I guess it's well established. They also show results and say that they did something called the "DIEHARD statistical test suite" (which is apparently a set of tests designed exactly for this problem, i.e. random number generation), and "confirm[ed] that the measured optical phase is a suitable source of random numbers", though I'll have to take them at their word because I'm not familiar with the theory behind this.
* First:
J. von Neumann, “Various techniques used in connection with random digits,” Nat. Bur. Stand., Appl. Math Ser. 12, 36–38 (1951).
Second:
A. Juels, M. Jakobsson, E. Shriver, and B. Hillyer, “How to turn loaded dice into fair coins,” IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 46, 911 –921 (2000).)
weinersmith
So, it's random as far as Aspect can tell.
We'll get true randomness as soon as that last digit for pi is discovered.
There is no random. There is only random enough.
You are welcome on my lawn.
As a card-carrying atheist I don't believe in a space-genie either. When things one generally holds to be true are not currently provable with the knowledge one (we as humanity) has, that does not make them invalid nor meaningless. Nor does it require a space-genie. One is free to hold beliefs, and even to actively pursue their validation or invalidation. Einstein did this, in this very realm we are discussing. As I posted in another part of this thread, science has frequently believed "this is as deep as it goes!" only to be proven incorrect later on. I for one am not arrogant enough to believe that there cannot be some underlying deterministic cause for the phenomena we currently recognize as "random". And I would not respect the scientist who holds otherwise--but I would respect the scientist that believes there can exist phenomena without underlying deterministic cause.
I've looked at your post 8 times so far, and it always returns 7 and 3 as random numbers. It's not so random when it always returns the same predictable values.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
You're both spoiled! I had 4Mb and only 2Mb on the card and thought I was kicking! Funny now when I have 8Gb on my netbook and the same on my desktop to think about how I spent more for a tiny couple of Mb of RAM back then than I did for my whole netbook now. I'll never forget though the first time I loaded up my Voodoo in my spanking new 133Mhz and loaded Unreal, I swear me and my friends just watched that opening demo for ages going "ooooh!". Man we were easily entertained back then.
as for TFA I never understood why getting a random number always seemed to be so hard, just take all the scores off the sports page, multiple by that last winning powerball numbers, then divide by how many pepperonis you got on your last pizza. Easy peasy!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I can put away that cup of really hot tea.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
OK, if we want to talk about fun hardware:
A DX2 66 486 with 64MB RAM, two 1GB SCSI disks and a CDROM with a 4MB VRAM card. But, that was just the desktop machine. It only clocked in at about $8K (work really sprung for that one) Then there was the decked out Indigo 2. Don't recall the RAM, but the MIPS 4400 upgrade was around 8K alone, and that was small potatoes compared to the $25K 256 layer Z-buffer video card that was added in. That's right - $25K for a video card that today is probably outpaced by pretty much anything you pull out of the recycling pile. And it was the low price of $25K because we bought 2 in a bundle with the upgrades. Originally they went for $38K.
Of course, all of those prices are totally blown away by the $8K 430MB WORM drive we purchased. To truly get how expensively stupid this purchase was, you have to understand how WORM drives operate. They basically had their own controller internally that worked with the internal hardware to position the write/read head as you progressed along the spiral. The problem was, there was no segmentation of the disk, no error correction, no guide tracks, or anything else. So, the entire process was based on the head placement mechanism being in the right place at the right point of the spin to write/read the data. The problem was, these parts would wear, so a disk was good across about 250-400 read-write cycles of the drive. Read that again - the drive could only be used less than 250 times reliably between the writing of a disk and the current reading. After 250, it got dicey, after 400, you could no longer read it. Oh, and just to compare it to today's BD disks, a WORM disk at the time sold for roughly $100 a piece in lots of 100.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Just because we can't know a position and vector of a particle now doesn't mean we won't ever be able to.
Yes it does. The Heisenburg uncertainty principle is not a limitation of technology. It's a law of the universe. It's like saying "just because gravity exists today doesn't mean it will exist sometime in the future."
A lot of tools have diamond blades.
Huh? +4 informative? I've been absent from /. for a good 5 years, but in my day that comment would have looked like
A lot of tools have diamond blades.