David Nicol wrote:
Who else has read "The Muller-Fokker Effect" by John Sladek? http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0881845485/?tag=tipjartransactio
I bring that up because it is a very entertaining book about a data storage medium -- the book was first published in 1970, it's funny magnetic tape -- with a fine sense of humor. Use Muller-Fokker equipment and your random pen plots become witty fractal cartoons that out-Monet Monet and out-Goldberg Goldberg at the same time.
Ah, yes! This is the kind of direction to think. Creative! Was there any way to control the Muller-Fokker equipment, or did it out-Goldberg Goldberg one day, and out-Picasso Picasso the next? I am guessing that the phrase "funny magnetic tape" means the book is "ancient, from the very beginning of the Unix epoch, when magnetic tape was used for storage. And humorous."
TRULY RANDOM
What about overloading a diode? Or timing radioactive decay? There was a firm in the late nineties that got millions of venture dollars for a random number generator that involved three video cameras pointed at lava lamps, for instance. Anyone who knew that you can get perfectly good white noise anywhere, anytime, found that disturbing.
Exactly. Such wild speculation caused the dotcom crash. :-) I suppose the emperor soon got his clothes on with that one.
However, you make a really good point: White noise is often an _effect_ captured in the digital world which is _caused_ in the real world.
Notice that in all three of your examples to achieve true randomness, you are utilizing an analog-to-digital conversion. (i.e. you are capturing a random pattern occurring in the Real World with digital annotation). Note also that ternary logic handles analog-to-digital conversion much more efficiently than binary. This is empirically true, and demonstrated mathematically here:
http://www.trinary.cc/Tutorial/Interface/Analog.htm
So the question is now refined to greater accuracy, but remains:
Is it possible to create a random number generator that has absolutely no interface with the analog, organic, real world? In other words, is entirely digital in origin?
Anyone for overloading components to make a hardware /dev/random card? Is there a market for it? I doubt there is. There are plenty of available organic inputs about to re-key your generators with; That's why openSSL times keystrokes while generating keys, for example.
Yes. Or mouse movements, or any other "analog" movement. And for contemporary uses of random numbers, these organic inputs are sufficient to create superduper truly random numbers. However, ever notice how the image CAPTCHAs are getting increasingly sophisticated, because also the software which cracks them is also? This is the same with all encryption: It works today, but tomorrow it is useless.
Within ten years, we will have computers which can crack open the random seeds you described with brute force alone, and there will be other techniques developed by then, as well. We already saw that the 700 Ghz light-based processor is just around the corner, and I imagine we'll see 1 Thz by 2012...
Today's high-security encryption is tomorrow's child's toy.
What I propose is not useful today, but will be perfect timing when it appears on the market in about one decade, when people are starting to look seriously for a way to generate true randomness without cumbersome analog interfaces. Or at least with an elegant way to interface with analog phenomena.
The link to the page on the model of the base-3 nineteenth century adding machine was certainly interesting. I saw a bit on television once about a group that had built a model of a clockwork table that DaVinci had designed, which could be programmed to tote stuff from room to room, i think by placing pegs in a wheel which turned much more slowly than the drive wheels, to steer. (the steering was done by the pegs, or absence of pegs, IIRC.)
It's fun to imagine that several were built, and Medicis of all stripes oohed and aahed as snacks appeared carried not by a live servant but on a moving table.
So Leonardo da Vinci created the first robot!
I read recently that Tesla designed a turbine which was necessarily so large that no one could afford the first prototype, until a large oil company realized that it was just what they needed. The first one was manufactured in the 1990s, and is used on big oil rigs out in the ocean. Tesla still gets the credit, even though he had no working prototype in his lifetime.
So I'm content with simply putting this idea out there, even if I never get the chance to actually build it physically. The point is to get it into the hands of the ordinary people before the military gets ahold of it... of course ... :-)
-Jared