From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Sun Sep 01 2002 - 11:34:05 MDT
On Sunday 01 September 2002 04:59, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Sun, 1 Sep 2002, scerir wrote:
> > A "true" random number generator is this
> > http://www.gap-optique.unige.ch/Prototypes/QRNG/default.asp
>
> 1) all I see is a picture of a box next to a number of claims. Depending
> on my level of paranoia, I can accept these claims at face value, take
> a box apart and analyse it, or just reject it and roll my own entropy
> generator.
>
> 2) I have no evidence that QM sources are any more random that macroscale
> noise sources, in fact they could be a lot less random. A microphone
> stuck into a turbulent air stream is a much more complicated system
> that a single-photon source and a beam splitter.
Well, you could take a feed from a geiger counter. That's pretty random. Or
you could build an old tube amplifier, and drive the gain high enough to
start getting noise on a null input.
Without knowing your purpose, it's hard to guess just how much effort you are
willing to go to, and what distribution of values you need. You'd design a
system differently to pick up a normal distribution or a binary choice even
though one could be used to model the other.
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