New quantum random number generator achieves 2 Gbit/s speed
Jun 2024, phys.org
"The new photonic integrated circuit comprises two lasers that emit optical pulses with random phases due to quantum noise.
PRNGs - pseudo random number generators (I think) refers to numbers produced by algorithm instead of a natural process like radio static, television fuzz, raindrops on a window, etc.
via Toshiba Europe Ltd: Davide G. Marangon et al, A fast and robust quantum random number generator with a self-contained integrated photonic randomness core, Nature Electronics (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41928-024-01140-0.
Image credit: Beach sand - Zhang Chao Nikon Small World - 2024 [link]
The search for the random numbers that run our lives
Jul 2024, BBC News
I'm mashing up the article here, and at this point I'm really not sure why it matters, if robots can do it (looking at you Apple-rewriting-BBC-headlines) why can't I?
Back in 1997, Haahr and three of his friends had been working on gambling software – digital slot machines and blackjack games that they wanted to host online, and he knew that they would need to be able to generate reliably random numbers. If these things weren't random, the digital casino wouldn't be very fair and players could even try to beat the system by looking for predictable patterns in the games. So they went and got a really crackly radio, a messy signal shaped by lightning and electromagnetic activity in the Earth's atmosphere, converted to ones and zeroes.Computers aren't random because they rely on internal mechanisms that are at some level predictable. So people try other things, like listening to the racket of electrical storms, capturing pictures of raindrops on glass, and playing with the tiniest particles in the known Universe.The radio didn't make them rich, but it's still useful, and was made available to the public at random.org, where it has been churning out random numbers ever since the San Francisco Mayor's Office uses it to draw winners for affordable housing. Or scientists use it to randomise participants in experiments, marketing firms that give away prizes to consumers choose their winners, or employers use it for drug screening to select employees randomly, and one man uses it to choose which discs from his 700-strong CD collection to put into his car each week.Cloudflare uses a wall of colourful lava lamps. Others use raindrops falling on glass, bubbles in a fish tank, the behaviour of a kitten, sequences in DNA, clicks of radioactive decay of a banana picked up with Geiger counters, wandering mooshroom cows in Minecraft, the movement of a mouse cursor on a computer screen, the time delay between key presses on a keyboard, the noise of traffic on a computer network, tiny particles of light arriving at a detector, photons emitted by a laser pulse.But nothing is perfectly random, and we can never prove that something is perfectly random either. We can only prove that it's not random.But quantum randomness - a company called Quantum Dice is developing its own quantum-random-number-generating technology. But "If a photon hits the sensor, it will ever so slightly warm it up, possibly making it more or less sensitive to future strikes".Also - When the chips are down, no matter how exquisite a random number generator is in principle, you still have to trust that the person running it hasn't lost their scruples.Bonus: When random number generators don't do their jobs properly, you can expect that malicious people might try to exploit them. In 2017, Wired reported on the case of a Russian hacker who allegedly got people to film the activity of slot machines at casinos. Based on the results of each play, he was able to predict the workings of the machines' internal random number generators and, therefore, determine when they would next pay out.
Post Script:
Must Read - Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, by Natasha Dow Schüll, 2012
