alt Hacker NewsQuantum mechanics provide truly random numbers on demand
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My regular mechanic does that. "How much to get this car working again?" [sucks through teeth...]
How would we know ontic randomness when we see it? I can understand how we would epistemic randomness, but not ontic.
For a lot of eg security-related applications where you want random numbers you don't want them to be publicly known. I wonder whether there are any risks to a naive approach of turning those numbers into private random numbers, eg hashing them together with a secret? Should you rotate the secret?
It would be interesting if the researchers could clarify this before people start rolling their own solutions.
> When researchers measure an individual particle, the outcome is random, but the properties of the pair are more correlated than classical physics allows, enabling researchers to verify the randomness.
Is this not possibly just random-seeming to us, because we do not know or cannot measure all the variables?
> The process starts by generating a pair of entangled photons inside a special nonlinear crystal. The photons travel via optical fiber to separate labs at opposite ends of the hall.
> Once the photons reach the labs, their polarizations are measured. The outcomes of these measurements are truly random.
I understand that obviously for our purposes (e.g. for encryption), this is safely random, but from a pure science perspective, have we actually proven that the waveform collapsing during measurement is "truly random"?
How could we possibly assert that we've accounted for all variables that could be affecting this? There could be variables at play that we don't even know exist, when it comes to quantum mechanics, no?
A coin toss is completely deterministic if you can account for wind, air resistance, momentum, starting state, mass, etc. But if you don't know that air resistance or wind exists, you could easily conclude it's random.
I ask this as a layman, and I'm really interested if anyone has insight into this.
Many years ago I used to work for a company in the gambling domain. There was a story going around from years before I joined that hardware TNRGs where used. And one day they failed. I can't remember precisely but heat was involved in one way or another and the failure mode they encountered was caused by overheating and repeatedly giving an endless series ones. A switch to PNRGs was promptly introduced.
Write an array of random values to a hard drive — terabytes of them.
Dupe the drive.
You now have a matching pair of "one-time pads" for, I have heard, the hardest form of encryption to decrypt. I would think expect there is a business already doing this.
One possible definition of "random" in this context: Is there any conceivable algorithm, perhaps one that models the entire universe in all of its particulars, that predicts the next string produced by the NIST quantum beacon?
"...is something that nothing in the universe can predict in advance"
The universe is a swirling vortex of entropy. In theory, with enough data, you can predict anything, at any point in time. There is no such thing as "truly random"
> "Mathematic model of quantum world" provide truly random numbers on demand
"Random" is a really interesting concept because it's intuitive yet hard to define. It's really a definition by exclusion, that is if you can't describe something in any way then it's random by default. But how do you know you just haven't found the way to define it yet?
This is somewhat related to the idea of complexity. So if you have a sequence of "random" numbers, how do you know they're random? Take a look at a Mandelbrot Set and you wouldn't guess it's not that complex.
I really like the idea of Kolomogorv complexity [1], which is to say that the complexity of an object (including a sequence of numbers) is defined by the shortest program that can produce that result. So a sequence of number generated by a PRNG isn't complex because an infinite sequence of such numbers can be reduced to the (finite) size of the program and initial seed.
There are various random number generators that use quantum effects to create random numbers. One interesting implication of this is that it ends the debate about whether quantum effects can affect the "classical" or "macro" world.
This is a press release for the University of Colorado's CURBy - CU Randomness Beacon @ https://random.colorado.edu/
s/provide/provides/
It isn't quantum, but as far as I know https://www.random.org/ is sufficiently random for any purpose that I can think of for publicly verifiable random numbers.
(Most of the demand for random numbers, of course, comes from cryptography. In which case public verifiability of what the random thing was is the last thing that you want.)