‘Sounds of Silence’ Proving a Hit: World’s Fastest Random Number Generator
From the post:
Researchers at The Australian National University have developed the fastest random number generator in the world by listening to the ‘sounds of silence’.
The researchers — Professor Ping Koy Lam, Dr Thomas Symul and Dr Syed Assad from the ANU ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology — have tuned their very sensitive light detectors to listen to vacuum — a region of space that is empty.
Professor Lam said vacuum was once thought to be completely empty, dark, and silent until the discovery of the modern quantum theory. Since then scientists have discovered that vacuum is an extent of space that has virtual sub-atomic particles spontaneously appearing and disappearing.
It is the presence of these virtual particles that give rise to random noise. This ‘vacuum noise’ is omnipresent and may affect and ultimately pose a limit to the performances of fibre optic communication, radio broadcasts and computer operation.
“While it has always been thought to be an annoyance that engineers and scientists would like to circumvent, we instead exploited this vacuum noise and used it to generate random numbers,” Professor Lam said.
“Random number generation has many uses in information technology. Global climate prediction, air traffic control, electronic gaming, encryption, and various types of computer modelling all rely on the availability of unbiased, truly random numbers.
All the talk about security and trust reminded me of this post.
Just in case your topic map software needs random numbers for encryption or other purposes.
See: Quantum Random Number Generator for papers and a live random number feed.
Assuming you “trust” some alphabet soup agency has not spoofed the IP address and has its own feed of pseudo-random numbers in place of the real one.
If not, you need to build your own quantum detector, assuming you “trust” the parts have not been altered to produces their “random” numbers.
If not, you could build your own parts, but only if you remember to wear your tin hat at all times to prevent/interfere with mind control efforts.
Trust is a difficult issue.