Geneva boffins make light work of random numbers “How good is your random number generator?” is a pretty ticklish question in cryptography that a bunch of Swiss quantum bods have set out to answer. The history of crypto is littered with examples of buggy random number generators, so the group at the University of Geneva have set out to create a self-testing quantum RNG that …
One cool use was by Max Tegmark and Anthony Aguire. They co-authored a paper, couldn't agree which of them should have their name listed first, so used a quantum random number generator to decide. In this universe Aguire is listed first but, in 50% of the level I and level III multiverses, Tegmark is listed first. Nice.
Nice for theoretical work, but how many of us could afford such gear? Can you embed it in a laptop computer, or tablet? Probably not, at least yet. At this point, one of the better approaches in a practical sense is a lagged-Fibonacci RNG (see http://www.phy.ornl.gov/csep/CSEP/RN/NODE20.html#SECTION00070000000000000000 for details).
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