True Random Number Generator Goes Online

amigoro writes "A 'true' random number generator that relies on the unpredictable quantum process of photon emission has gone online providing academic and scientific community access to true random numbers free of charge."

Wow!

[by Anonymous Coward]

..BZT, qvq nalbar frr gung gb ertvfgre lbh unir
gb fbyir n zngu ceboyrz yvxr:

    qrevingvir bs (5*fva 3k +6pbf(-cv/2))

Avpr!

Urer vf n qverpg yvax gb gur trarengbe, lbh pna
qbjaybnq gur pyvrag sebz urer nf jryy:

uggc://enaqbz.veo.ue/

DEnaq Pbzznaq-yvar Hgvyvgl [i0.2, 2007-07-17]
Abgr 1: Pbzcvyrf haqre Ivfhny Fghqvb naq t++.
Abgr 2: Jvaqbjf rkrphgnoyr vapyhqrq.
Abgr 3: TAH Yvahk rkrphgnoyr vapyhqrq.

Re:Wow!

[Xiph1980 (944189)]

Too bad that's only ROT13:
Not really the hardest of encryptions to crack.

..OMG, did anyone see that to register you have
to solve a math problem like:

derivative of (5*sin 3x +6cos(-pi/2))

Nice!

Here is a direct link to the generator, you can
download the client from here as well:

http://random.irb.hr/ [random.irb.hr]

QRand Command-line Utility [v0.2, 2007-07-17]
Note 1: Compiles under Visual Studio and g++.
Note 2: Windows executable included.
Note 3: GNU Linux executable included.

Re:Wow!

[by Anonymous Coward]

Too bad that's only ROT13: Not really the hardest of encryptions to crack.

Yeah, that's why I always apply it twice for extra security.

Re:Wow!

[MillionthMonkey (240664)]

..OMG, did anyone see that to register you have to solve a math problem like:

derivative of (5*sin 3x +6cos(-pi/2))

7h15 15 345y. 6 * (05(-p1/2) = z3r0), 50 7h3 4n5w3r 15 ju57 15 * (05(3x).

|\/|y m07h3r (0u|d h4v3 d1ff3r3n71473d 7h47.

Re:Wow!

[Xiph1980 (944189)]

Your mother a math teacher or a PhD?
My mother doesn't even know what a sine is, let alone solve that to 15*cos(3x)

Re:Wow!

[Shadow Wrought (586631)]

Nah, he's just the millionth one. The first 999,999 turned up crap. All 1,000,001 could come up with was, "It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times..."

Re:Wow!

[AmiAthena (798358)]

I'm sure my mom would be proud if I told her that I'm lost on the math, but I read that in one pass with no problem. *sigh*

Re:wonky definition of pseudo-random

[Baron von Leezard (675918)]

I'm not concerned that it's not pseudo-random. My point is that's not how any modern pseudo-random number generators actually work. Maybe during WWII, but not today. The common PRNG techniques are:

1. linear congruential generators
   
2. lagged Fibonacci generators
   
3. linear feedback shift registers
   
4. generalised feedback shift registers
   
5. Mersenne twister
   
6. Fortuna (if you need one that's cryptographically secure)
   
7. Blum Blum Shub (likewise)
   

These are all pure mathematical algorithms. Nowhere in any of these is there any sort of pre-generated random lookup tables. (Unless you count the S-boxes used in some block ciphers with Fortuna.) Pre-generated "random" lookup tables only hide poor randomness in the generation process and don't actually improve the situation cryptographically at all; I suspect that for most other applications there would be problems as well. If your generated numbers don't cover the entire domain space uniformly, then they still won't no matter how many lookup tables you use to transform them.

According to the article, people are sitting around rolling dice to generate random number sequences. Really? REALLY?!? Who wrote this article?

[BvL]

455FE10422CA29C4933F95052B792AB2

[ferrellcat (691126)]

Hey! It works!

Re:455FE10422CA29C4933F95052B792AB2

[Filter (6719)]

Step 1: 455FE10422CA29C4933F95052B792AB2
Step 2: ?
Step 3: Profit!!!

Re:455FE10422CA29C4933F95052B792AB2

[ari_j (90255)]

Thanks! Now, to put it to good use:

uint128_t rand() {
/* This number is guaranteed to be random. See http://random.irb.hr/ for details. */
return 0x455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2;
}

Re:

[qweqwe321 (1097441)]

Oh yeah? I got 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0!

I got FC5052B792AB2455FE10422CA29C4933

[Joce640k (829181)]

My number's bigger than your number...

Wait...

[Icarus1919 (802533)]

Why do I keep getting 42?

Re:Wait...

[theantipop (803016)]

I don't know, but that's pretty improbable.

Re:Wait...

[Puff of Logic (895805)]

I don't know, but that's pretty improbable.

Nonsense. Million-to-one chances occur nine times out of ten!

Re:Wait...

[SmurfButcher Bob (313810)]

75% of all pie charts resemble Pac-Man.

Re:Wait...

[Lord Ender (156273)]

Actually, a random number generator isn't really random unless it is possible for it to generate the number 42 a thousand times in a row...

Re:Wait...

[AchiIIe (974900)]

Bah, you must be a mathematician.
If you put a monkey in front of a typewriter and he types on it for an infinite amount of time, he'll eventually type all of Shakespeare's work.

It's called the Infinite monkey theorem [wikipedia.org]

Ignoring punctuation, spacing, and capitalization, a monkey typing letters uniformly at random has one chance in 26 of correctly typing the first letter of Hamlet. It has one chance in 676 (26 times 26) of typing the first two letters. Because the probability shrinks exponentially, at 20 letters it already has only one chance in 26^20 = 19,928,148,895,209,409,152,340,197,376, roughly equivalent to the probability of buying 4 lottery tickets consecutively and winning the jackpot each time. In the case of the entire text of Hamlet, the probabilities are so vanishingly small they can barely be conceived in human terms. The text of Hamlet, even stripped of punctuation, contains well over 130,000 letters which would lead to a probability of one in 3.4×10^183946.

For comparison purposes, there are only about 10^79 atoms in the observable universe and only 4.3 x 10^17 seconds have elapsed since the Big Bang. Even if the universe were filled with monkeys typing for all time, their total probability to produce a single instance of Hamlet would still be less than one chance in 10183800. As Kittel and Kroemer put it, "The probability of Hamlet is therefore zero in any operational sense of an event...", and the statement that the monkeys must eventually succeed "gives a misleading conclusion about very, very large numbers." This is from their textbook on thermodynamics, the field whose statistical foundations motivated the first known expositions of typing monkeys

Re:Wait...

[snickkers (1023847)]

The closest we'll get to proof that Shakespeare wasn't a monkey.

Re:Wait...

[Nazlfrag (1035012)]

Silly statisticians miss the point. Why do all portrayals of the great bard have him bearded? Monkeys were often used as assistants and servants hundreds of years ago, why not use one as a scriptwriter? How else do you explain all the strange spelling and random line breaks? History proves Shakespeare was a monkey without a shadow of a doubt, regardless of silly mathematicians trying to compare the immortal poet, or any other monkey at a typewriter with random numbers. A chimpanzee shares 99.7% of our DNA, yet we call them random number generators? Pseudoscientific quackery at its worst.

Web 2.0? monkeys!!

[myowntrueself (607117)]

As Kittel and Kroemer put it, "The probability of Hamlet is therefore zero in any operational sense of an event...", and the statement that the monkeys must eventually succeed "gives a misleading conclusion about very, very large numbers."

So in other words there really is *no* hope that web 2.0 will actually produce anything truly outstanding?

Re:Wait...

[Trogre (513942)]

And yet, if those monkeys are truly typing randomly, any set of 130,000 characters they type has exactly the same chance of being Hamlet as it does anything else.

Let's say my cat just traipsed on my keyboard and typed "dsafhhrnvcdbqwtrwqerwe897509k;ln b,.cnjhcvdsytwejbhd". Yesterday I might have asked you what were the chances of a cat randomly typing "dsafhhrnvcdbqwtrwqerwe897509k;ln b,.cnjhcvdsytwejbhd", and you might have replied "vanishingly small, so much so that it just isn't going to happen in your lifetime". And you'd be right from a statistical point of view. Yet it happened.

Re:Wait...

[Bluesman (104513)]

>my cat just traipsed on my keyboard and typed "dsafhhrnvcdbqwtrwqerwe897509k;ln b,.cnjhcvdsytwejbhd"

I've read that one, it sucked. The butler did it and they catch him in the end.

Your cat should have typed Hamlet.

Re:Wait...

[ajs (35943)]

Actually, a random number generator isn't really random unless it is possible for it to generate the number 42 a thousand times in a row...

Not so.

A random number generator might generate numbers in the range 0x10000000 to 0xfffffff0 (and thus never generate 42 (0x0000002a) as a result). As long as the distribution within that range is uniform, non-periodic, and lacking in underlying structure, it's random. If it meets the first and last requirement, but is periodic, then it's pseudo-random.

lava lamps at SGI

[TheGratefulNet (143330)]

when I think of random numbers, I can't help but remember the 'fishbowl' that had at SGI (mtn view) where an indycam was photo'ing some lavalamps and creating random seeds based on those images.

ah, SGI....

Re:lava lamps at SGI

[Richard W.M. Jones (591125)]

That would be Lavarand [wikipedia.org] from, oh, just 10 years ago [archive.org].

Rich

lava lamps at SGI - lavarand

[SpaceLifeForm (228190)]

More info for those unfamiliar with the lava lamps random number generator:

lavarand [wikipedia.org]

A similar LGPL implementation: LavaRnd [lavarnd.org]

random.org ?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Hasn't random.org [random.org] done this for a while already? Perhaps they don't have academic backing, but I do believe they use numbers generated by atomic decay.

Re:random.org ?

[stinerman (812158)]

Indeed. First page:

RANDOM.ORG offers true random numbers to anyone on the Internet. The randomness comes from atmospheric noise, which for many purposes is better than the pseudo-random number algorithms typically used in computer programs. ...

The service has been operating since 1998 and was built and is being maintained by Mads Haahr who is a Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College, Dublin in Ireland.

Re:random.org ?

[lawpoop (604919)]

I do believe they use numbers generated by atomic decay.

The site claims that

The randomness comes from atmospheric noise...

I wonder, how could you know that their numbers are truly random, as they claim?

Re:random.org ?

[psu_whammy (940612)]

You could, say, read up on the statistics [random.org] they give you. The site has all sorts of fun info on exactly how their RNG works, and daily stats on the randomness of the numbers presented.

Re:random.org ?

[AutumnLeaf (50333)]

I wonder, how could you know that their numbers are truly random, as they claim?

You can never know that. You can test "properties of randomness" and conclude "it looks random." But you have no way of knowing if that hopefully random sequence cross-correlates to a non-random sequence you haven't found, but that passes all of the tests.

On the other hand, there is no randomness like quantum randomness. So if you believe their bit-stream faithfully represents the source, then in this case you can feel pretty good about it.

Re:Here's what I do

[slickwillie (34689)]

I just checksum my Windows registry.

It's random enough for my purposes.

Don't misunderstand

[Icarus1919 (802533)]

True random number [wikipedia.org] generators have been around in hardware form for a while based on a number of different processes, not quantum only. But this is being offered to the community at large, who may not have the means to procure or pay for a hardware solution.

Re:

[Urusai (865560)]

Finally, something to make the OLPC useful.

Re:Don't misunderstand

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

Don't Via C3 chips have a hardware random number generator, that uses quantum-level fluctuations in the chip (i.e. the kind of noise that most of the rest of the chip is specifically designed to try to avoid) to produce noise as output? Since these cost under $100, I can't see a researcher not being able to afford one. You obviously can't use this service for cryptography, since relying on someone else for your entropy is just asking for trouble.

quantum random number generators

[Wise Dragon (71071)]

This is neat but there have been other quantum random number generators online for years. This one by id Quantique springs to mind... [randomnumbers.info] I'm not sure what this new service provides that others don't. If you REALLY want secure random numbers you should buy a QRNG PCI card and make them yourself so you're the only one with a copy.

Re:quantum random number generators

[Rakishi (759894)]

You probably don't want to do that for a computer simulation running at a few ghz thou.

That's what grad students are for.

Erm..

[Creepy Crawler (680178)]

Does anybody have a mirror?

It keeps changing on me!

Other sources of true random numbers

[i_like_spam (874080)]

Atmospheric noise [random.org]
Lava lamps [lavarnd.org]
Radioactive decay [fourmilab.ch]
Entropy [hd.org]

An external random number generator?

[solevita (967690)]

Call me paranoid, but I think I'd rather use a local pseudo random number generator than an external true random generator. My security concerns associated with using a local pseudo random number generator are outweighed by my privacy concerns of contacting a third party every time I want to establish a SSH connection or use my credit card online.

Great for research though, of course.

Re:Why pseudo-random for research? Reproducibility

[AK Marc (707885)]

If you need to repeat the random series, why don't you just store the numbers in a file?

Because with pseudo-random seeds, I do. I store the 1000 seeds and run it 10,000 iterations on each run. If I were to store each random number, I'd have to store 10,000,000 numbers in my file rather than 1000. I'll always store them, but the question is whether it takes 1000 records or 10,000,000. For academic purposes, the results aren't statistically different, so why store more numbers?

Finally an improved software estimate methodology

[JurassicPizza (972175)]

I've been waiting on this for a long time.

Captchas require calculus

[poszi (698272)]

Look at the signup page [random.irb.hr]. You not only need to prove that you are a human but also that you have elementary knowledge of calculus.

Re:Captchas require calculus

[E++99 (880734)]

Look at the signup page. You not only need to prove that you are a human but also that you have elementary knowledge of calculus.

I propose adding this to the /. signup process.

Weird...

[patternmatch (951637)]

I keep getting 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0...

Re:

[JesseL (107722)]

These things usually use a natural noise source as a random seed and then mathematically normalize them to produce random numbers that are useful. It's pretty standard stuff.

Re:Great

[TheSHAD0W (258774)]

Beware of MITM attacks!

close

[geekoid (135745)]

"Random" is a word used when an event has too many unknowns to reasonably no the outcome.

To use a very simple random event: Flipping a coin.

If you know all the variables, you will know what the outcome will be.
How heavy is the coin? what side is up at the moment of the flip? whats the air density? how hard was it flipped? etc. . .