FPGA

[Jared]

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