[dba-Tech] Random Numbers at Last

Arthur Fuller fuller.artful at gmail.com
Wed Nov 30 07:51:56 CST 2011


>From slashdot:

*"An Ottawa physicist is using laser light to create truly random numbers
much faster than other methods do, with obvious potential benefits to
cryptography: 'Sussman's Ottawa lab uses a pulse of laser light that lasts
a few trillionths of a second. His team shines it at a diamond. The light
goes in and comes out again, but along the way, it changes. ... It is
changed because it has interacted with quantum vacuum
fluctuations<http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/GENERATING+RANDOM+NUMBERS/5779618/story.html>,
the microscopic flickering of the amount of energy in a point in space. ...
What happens to the light is unknown — and unknowable. Sussman's lab can
measure the pulses of laser light that emerge from this mysterious
transformation, and the measurements are random in a way that nothing in
our ordinary surroundings is. Those measurements are his random numbers.'"*

-- 
A.
Cell: 647.710.1314

Thirty spokes converge on a hub
but it's the emptiness
that makes a wheel work
   -- from the Daodejing


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