Randomness

[David Morris]

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/12/science/12RAND.html

June 12, 2001
Connoisseurs of Chaos Offer a Valuable Product: Randomness
By GEORGE JOHNSON

In an age when most people seem obsessed with bringing order to their lives 
— with Day- Timers, Palm Pilots, and even professional anticlutter 
specialists to wrestle their closets and junk drawers into line — a Web site 
in Switzerland has been offering a very different service: providing the 
world with randomness.

Pay a visit to the home page of this purveyor of unpredictability, called 
Hotbits, and you will hear what sounds like the erratic clicking of a Geiger 
counter.

It is the sound of neutrons in a radioactive substance spewing out electrons 
and gamma rays as they decay. This decay is random, as guaranteed by laws of 
quantum mechanics, so by training a Geiger counter on a sample of krypton 85 
and feeding the signal to a computer, Hotbits (www.fourmilab.ch /hotbits) 
generates a constant stream of random digits. Just fill out an electronic 
form, saying how many bits you want and they will be dispatched immediately 
over the Internet.

Or you may turn to one of Hotbits's rivals. Random.org generates 
unpredictable sequences of data using a radio tuned between stations, 
harvesting the atmospheric noise. Another operation, Lavarand (on the Web at 
lavarand.sgi.com), produces random numbers by training digital cameras on 
burbling lava lamps.

Perverse as all this may sound, the connoisseurs of chaos are offering a 
valuable commodity. For cryptography, game-playing, sociological surveys and 
various scientific calculations, people often need series of numbers that 
are devoid of pattern. And that is a tall order. Generating true randomness 
is one of computer science's most difficult challenges.


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