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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.'"
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 just use the rand() function in Excel. Way less hassle than firing a laser through a diamond...
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.
Sigh. You kids who can't remember 10 years ago.
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"...
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.
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.
claims to be exploiting quantum effects in the P-N junctions to be a true RNG
Thats a wee bit of the wordy mumbo jumbo, like talking about the "maxwellian equation emitter controlled by polarization rotation human interface unit" I'm using to read this, instead of calling it a freaking monitor. Just call it a zener diode and be done with it. The Zener story is bizarre and this doesn't help. Clarence M. Zener came up with the theory for his diodes in the 30s, although they couldn't be built until the 50s when they thought it would be cool to name the diode after him, or maybe his physics equation, or both. Strange but true fact is that a "zener" diode operating below 5 volts uses the actual physics Zener effect and a "zener" diode operating above 5 volts uses the physics avalanche effect, which the Entropy Key claims to use.
Note that USB does not provide more than 5 volts and a reasonable current limiter means its gonna be operating well into zener-land.
So, A dude named Zener, invented Zener physics, leading to the theory of zener diodes, then someone else built one 20 years later and named it after him, and the key markets itself as using the closely related avalanche effect, but because only 5 volts is available without some sort of voltage multiplier or boost switching regulator, its probably actually using the low voltage Zener effect, regardless of the effect, devices using avalanche or zener effect are always marketed as zener diodes commercially, so I'm sure there is a Zener on the board. Which doesn't matter in the end, because zener noise is just as good as avalanche noise for crypto, as far as I know. In fact zener is probably better, less temperature dependence. Talk about abuse of proper nouns and trademarks... kinda like my Xerox machine at home was manufactured by Brother.
This stuff is all from memory, I hope I didn't swap Zener and Avalanche effects, although either way its still a heck of a story.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/221/
That cartoon contains code for returning a single value, but the programmer came up with that value by rolling the dice.
On behalf of all the blind readers of Slashdot, thank-you.
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.
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.