[Cryptography] Photon beam splitters for "true" random number generation ?

[Bill Frantz]

On 12/21/15 at 7:26 PM, mitch at niftyegg.com (Tom Mitchell) wrote:

>On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 6:51 AM, Patrick Chkoreff <patrick at rayservers.net>
>wrote:
>...
>>Right, or use a set of 16-sided dice.  I bought some a few years ago.
>>
>
>Why 16-side?
>N-sides allows base N and conversion to any other interesting base would be
>easy.
>The only constraint is the dice needs to have sufficient symmetry that any
>outcome
>is equal to any other OR the distribution is well enough understood that
>adjustments
>can be noted and compensated for (coin lands on an edge).

I wanted to use random chance in a knitting pattern I was 
building, so I tossed a coin. I quickly gave up on the coin when 
I discovered that my tosses were quite biased. I moved to using /dev/random.

Even with a reasonably unbiased item like a coin, getting random 
tosses can be hard.

Cheers - Bill

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