
Semiconductor Lasers Generate Better Random Numbers - nreece
http://www.physorg.com/news148660964.html
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randomwalker
I don't buy this.

Specifically, the notion that random numbers from physical sources are
important. The theory of pseudorandom generators is very well understood; and
cryptographic PRNGs even come with the guarantee that there is no known way to
tell the difference between its output and a truly random string. All you
need, then, is 80 bits of true randomness as a seed for RC4.

Of course there have been instances when random number generators have been
broken, such as Netscape's SSL once upon a time, but that was because it used
a non-random seed (the timestamp), and not because of a weakness in the
algorithm.

And this is all w.r.t. a malicious attacker. Simulations don't even come close
to testing the limits of random number generators (in a provable way; Michael
Mitzenmacher has a paper on this), and the Mersenne twister is in all
likelihood sufficient. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_twister>

It's really cool that they broke the true-randomness bandwidth record, but
does every discovery in materials science these days have to be justified with
potential applications to computing?

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mechanical_fish
Wow, finally my Ph.D. thesis work has an application! ;)

