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What I don't get is that the modern chips are reaching the level of being limited by quantum noise yet modern GPUs and Tensor processors don't seem to offer any
by joe_the_user 7y ago
What I don't get is that the modern chips are reaching the level of being limited by quantum noise yet modern GPUs and Tensor processors don't seem to offer any sources of quantum randomness. Can someone who understand this stuff please explain.
- smallnamespace 7y agoBeing affected by noise doesn't mean you get a source of noise that has the particular properties you want (namely, not compressible / not predictable in a statistical fashion). You can take 'bad' sources of noise and make them better, but these generally require a fair bit of math [1] and can be costly to implement. At that point, why not just use a PRNG a la urandom? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomness_extractor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomness_extractor
- nabla9 7y agoQuantum noise does not automatically mean quality randomness These discussions about randomness have the tendency to get too philosophical. In practice technical details matter more. For cryptographic or statistical applications you need steady quality. 256 bits of random state that gets slowly updated with few random bits from physical source (thermal or quantum noise), is enough when it's fed into PRNG process that whitens it.