True Random Number Generator Goes Online 439
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! (Score:5, Funny)
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! (Score:5, Informative)
Not really the hardest of encryptions to crack.
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! (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Random numbers and human psychology (Score:3, Informative)
Because then your own psychology comes into play.
If you ask people to pick a number between 1 and 10, the vast majority of them won't pick 1 or 10. People just don't like the edges. I think that they avoid 5, too, because it's right smack in the middle. For a number between 1 and 10 to be random, most people subconsciously want to make it not stand out and will pick something like 3, 6, or 8, thus not making it even ra
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Picking 1,2,3,4,5,6 is stupid. Thousands of people choose those numbers, so if they come up the winnings are going to be a tiny fraction of what you'd normally get.
Lets be realistic(ish): If the numbers 1,2,3,4,5 and 6 were drawn as winning lottery numbers, the press would be in uproar about the seeming lack of randomness. They'd be screaming that the machine was flawed, and maybe even the draw would be ruled as invalid (by clueless management at the lottery company).
If you had a winning lottery ticket with that same sequence, assuming you were the only person who had picked those numbers, accusations would fly that you had hacked the lottery machine! I can guar
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
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! (Score:4, Informative)
My mother doesn't even know what a sine is, let alone solve that to 15*cos(3x)
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Funny)
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As long as it was fairly random, one might say...
You see the problem?
Re:wonky definition of pseudo-random (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:455FE10422CA29C4933F95052B792AB2 (Score:5, Funny)
Step 2: ?
Step 3: Profit!!!
Re:455FE10422CA29C4933F95052B792AB2 (Score:5, Funny)
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MPAA is on to you! (Score:3, Informative)
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I got FC5052B792AB2455FE10422CA29C4933 (Score:4, Funny)
Great (Score:2)
Re:Great (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wait... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wait... (Score:5, Funny)
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And now I can afford to buy my single-wide! And have smokes, beer, and beef jerky for the rest of my life!
My brother's a Ford mechanic but he ain't never heard of quantums though. WTF is they?
Re:Wait... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wait... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wait... (Score:5, Interesting)
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... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wait... (Score:4, Funny)
Web 2.0? monkeys!! (Score:5, Funny)
So in other words there really is *no* hope that web 2.0 will actually produce anything truly outstanding?
Re:Wait... (Score:4, Interesting)
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... (Score:5, Funny)
I've read that one, it sucked. The butler did it and they catch him in the end.
Your cat should have typed Hamlet.
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Here are the questions that I need answered before I give your numbers any credibility.
Re:Wait... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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> 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
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However, if you get a 1,001st 42, chances are it's just broken.
lava lamps at SGI (Score:5, Interesting)
ah, SGI....
Re:lava lamps at SGI (Score:5, Informative)
That would be Lavarand [wikipedia.org] from, oh, just 10 years ago [archive.org].
Rich
lava lamps at SGI - lavarand (Score:4, Interesting)
lavarand [wikipedia.org]
A similar LGPL implementation: LavaRnd [lavarnd.org]
random.org ? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:random.org ? (Score:5, Informative)
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 ? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:random.org ? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:random.org ? (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
It's random enough for my purposes.
W00T! (Score:2)
I cannot wait (Score:2)
Don't misunderstand (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Don't misunderstand (Score:5, Interesting)
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No, it doesn't. To quote the article you linked to:
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In most cases it would, depending on the random distribution you're getting. Eg, in a random 8-bit number, you have 0-255. 111 of those start with 1, which is 43%; 67 start with 2, which is 26%; 11 each start with 3 through 9, which is 4% each.
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Tell that to online RPG dice rollers. A true and trustworthy online RNG service can also be non-repudiable, instead of having everyone needing to trust that you didn't rig the RNG algorithm on your side. An online Nomic I play uses the cents digit of the opening price of publicly traded stocks as a random digit (the sample is typically once a month, so it's chaotic enough). Random.org has a daily log of its numbers. I'd really love an online RNG
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just because it is 'impossible to predict' doesn't mean there's not a pattern to it that humans are just too dumb to figure out!
Hopefully (Score:2)
quantum random number generators (Score:5, Informative)
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Heck, if you really wanted to you could generate a relatively strong pr
Re:quantum random number generators (Score:5, Funny)
Yawn... (Score:2, Interesting)
John Walker (AutoDesk founder) has had a true random number generator available for web access for quite a long time. Looks like his site's currently down, but check out www.fourmilab.ch [fourmilab.ch] when it's sorted -- in addition to the random number generator he has a number of other cool gadgets and info. available.
Oh, and this line from the FA is priceless: "...is connected to the internet through advanced computer technologies such as computer clusters and GRID network." Don't get too technical on me...
Better quote from Fourmilab (Score:3)
So what's not "random" about other processes? (Score:2)
I believe there are even commercially available RNGs based on the same principles available at fairly low costs.
Wasn't there also a project that tried to see if the scope of human consciousness could affect these random event
Erm.. (Score:3, Funny)
It keeps changing on me!
Other sources of true random numbers (Score:5, Informative)
Lava lamps [lavarnd.org]
Radioactive decay [fourmilab.ch]
Entropy [hd.org]
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45
7
183
33
23
send me $100 for each addition random number.
ok bonus day
44
Sources of not so random numbers (Score:2, Funny)
Use 123, what does it matter anyway.
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- Reasons for women to get upset
- Promises from politicians
- Patent applications
- Marketing terminology
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I wonder (Score:2)
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An external random number generator? (Score:5, Insightful)
Great for research though, of course.
Why pseudo-random for research? Reproducibility! (Score:3, Informative)
For scientific research, there's a very good reason to use pseudo-random numbers: reproducibility.
If you're analyzing a stochastic model, you want to be able to generate lots of runs with different random sequences and gather statistics from the ensemble. But if you see interesting behavior in a particular run and want to take a closer look, you want to be able to go back and run it again, exactly as it happened the first time. In this case, you don't want real randomness, you want pseudo-randomness with
Re:Why pseudo-random for research? Reproducibility (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Link to the actual website. (Score:2)
wtf? (Score:2)
"Ordinary random number generators found in most computers in use today are 'pseudo-random' numbers that use various algorithms to pick the numbers from large pre-compiled databases of numbers obtained by methods such as rolling the dice."
In actuality, PRNGs typically operate based on a function with a very long periodicity, not a pre-compiled list of dice rolls. And what I consider to be a typical state-of-the-art contemporary random nu
Finally an improved software estimate methodology (Score:4, Funny)
Patent (Score:2)
Captchas require calculus (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Captchas require calculus (Score:5, Interesting)
I propose adding this to the
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Weird... (Score:3, Funny)
Improbability Drive (Score:2)
Not exactly rocket science. (Score:2)
The hiss you get is the amplified QUANTUM NOISE of the first RF amplifier stage.
If you need more bandwidth, tune your TV card to an unused channel. That'll give you about six megabits per second of really good noise.
Obligatory Dilbert Comic (Score:3, Funny)
[Tour of Accounting]
Accounting Troll: "Over here we have our random number generator"
Number Generator Troll: "Nine Nine Nine Nine Nine Nine"
Dilbert: "Are you sure that's random?"
Accounting Troll: "That's the problem with randomness: you can never be sure"
Noise should be random, right? (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently it is a quantum signup form too (Score:3, Funny)
"Quantum Random Bit Generator Service: Sign up failed
Congratulations! You have successfully registered for QRBG Service.
Now, you can log in and check your quota and usage statistics, or just start using the Service."
I guess I have to stuff a cat in a box to see if my account actually works now.
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Oh yeah? Being omniscient, wouldn't he know what number he'd generate before he generated it? Not too random, is it?
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- RG>
close (Score:5, Insightful)
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. . .
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