Re: Truly Random Numbers On A Quantum Computer??

Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:

From the original article:
 
   As deterministic systems, classical computers cannot create true
   randomness on demand. As a result, to offer true randomness in
   classical computing, we often resort to specialized hardware that
   harvests entropy from unpredictable physical sources, for instance,
   by looking at mouse movements, observing fluctuations in
   temperature, monitoring the movement of lava lamps or, in extreme
   cases, detecting cosmic radiation. These measures are unwieldy,
   difficult to scale and lack rigorous guarantees, limiting our
   ability to verify whether their outputs are truly random.
 
Physical sources can be found in pretty much every commodity CPU for the
last decade . So not that "difficult to scale" apparently.

Simple circuits using the (ancient) 2N3904 transistor abound on the
internet, and pre-date it as well.

Here's a newer circuit design specifically for battery-powered
cryptographic use and with lots of analysis and comparison with
another circuit:
https://betrusted.io/avalanche-noise

None of it requires cutting-edge technology. The main issue in the
past has simply been that it wasn't part of the original PC
architecture, so things like "looking at mouse movements" needed to
be done at first until it was added to modern hardware.

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