Charles McElwain wrote: > >James Gleeson, a physicist at Kent State > >University (330-672-9592, [EMAIL PROTECTED]) has come up with a > >cheap, fast solution. He shoots laser light into a sample of liquid > >crystals. But because the sample is subject to a turbulent flow, causing > >haphazard fluctuations in the orientation of the liquid crystals, the > >digitized transmitted light coming from the sample represents a stream of > >random numbers.
There's no way a laser's going to be cheaper than a Johnson noise generator. Really, the random number generation has been solved - use a Johnson noise generator for the random bits, and (not withstanding /dev/random's suboptimal behavior) put them through a cryptographic device which will spew out indefinite amounts of random numbers once it's gotten sufficiently seeded. -Bram Cohen "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" -- John Maynard Keynes --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]