Not sure where the obsession over random number generators (RNGs) came from, but here it is.
And let's start with this tangentially-related image, a working diagram of a slot machine taken from the book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll, 2012.
It's a cool picture to look at, but what it means is quite diabolical, and in order to understand it, you will need to read the book, which should be required reading for any cold-blooded capitalist, or anyone who plays video games, or engages with social media, or even for people who go grocery shopping for **** sake, because you're getting played, and you should know how the game works.
Back to the RNG's.
Using the unpredictable nature of quantum mechanics to generate truly random numbers
Jan 2021, phys.org
Lasers, photons, beam splitters, and quantum magic.
via: David Drahi et al. Certified Quantum Random Numbers from Untrusted Light, Physical Review X (2020). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.10.041048
Scientists develop laser system that generates random numbers at ultrafast speeds
Feb 2021, phys.org
Light rays reflect and interact with each other within the cavity of an hourglass-shaped cavity to create random patterns, which can then create random numbers.
via Nanyang Technological University: "Massively parallel ultrafast random bit generation with a chip-scale laser," Science (2021). https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6532/948
A device-independent protocol for more efficient random number generation
Mar 2021, phys.org
Researchers are currently trying to integrate their device-independent random number generator into public randomness beacons that output random bits at periodic intervals.
But what would I want with a public randomness beacon? What would I do with all these RNGs? Just wait.
via University of Colorado/NIST Boulder (CU/NIST Boulder) and the NTT Corporation in Japan: Device-independent randomness expansion with entangled photons. Nature Physics(2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-020-01153-4.
Post Script:
South Africa's lottery probed as 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 drawn and 20 win
Dec 2020, BBC News
That's all.
Post Post Script:
On randomness and cheating -- I used to take air samples in office buildings for carbon dioxide, to see if your ventilation system was working properly (people exhale CO2, and an excess suggests the air in the room isn't being ventilated). Hundreds of times over, I would write down the location and the CO2 concentration. After a long day, it got real hard to resist taking one measurement per office to get the basic idea and then writing random numbers for the rest of the space.
But I remembered something from graduate school -- you can't create a random number set. No matter how hard you try. You're just not random enough. If you try to make up the numbers on your CO2 map, it will be less random than chance, and you can actually measure that in the number set. Your boss, or your client, might run your measurements and find that they aren't random enough, and discover that you're a scheister.
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