Random Magic Paths - is it truly random?

[Saber Cherry]

Verjigorm said:
Interesting... is this device a miniature Geiger-Muller tube with some sort of radioactive isotope in a sealed chamber (similar to the technology used to make smoke detectors)?

Hehe... no=) It's pretty simple - it uses some sort of temperature-monitoring circuitry, with random thermal fluctuations accumulating in a large buffer to be stored until a random number is needed. The chip also has a built-in hardware cryptography engine (using AES) and I think the random numbers are utilized by that, though they are also availible to software running on the computer.

Obviously, on the macro scale, temperature is not a purely random thing, or else chemistry would be a lost cause. However, if you measure temperature precisely enough, you start getting true randomness from microscopic sources, just like if you track a dust particle closely enough, you see random Brownian motion. Is Brownian motion random? Yes, because air molecules are small enough that the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle and momentum changes from randomly emitted photons start to play a significant role.

If you want to learn more about it, try doing a search for Via's hardware encryption engine. Also, either Ace's Hardware or ViaArena did a big feature on it a year or so back.