The generation of truly random binary numbers

C.H. Vincent

C.H. Vincent

Harshil Singh Bhatia, Edith Tretschk, Christian Theobalt +1 more

This study investigates how qubits of modern quantum annealers (QA) such as D-Wave can be applied for generating truly random numbers. We show how a QA can be initialised and how the annealing schedule can be set so that after the annealing, thousands of truly random binary numbers are measured in parallel. Those can then be converted to uniformly distributed natural or real numbers in desired ranges, either biased or unbiased. We discuss the observed qubits’ properties and their influence on the random number generation and consider various physical factors that influence the performance of our generator, i.e., digital-to-analogue quantisation errors, flux errors, temperature errors and spin bath polarisation. The numbers generated by the proposed algorithm successfully pass various tests on randomness from the NIST test suite. Our source code and large sets of truly random numbers are publicly available on our project web pagehttps://4dqv.mpi-inf.mpg.de/QRNG/.

Zhiliang L. Yuan

Viacheslav N. Chizhevsky, D. B. Horoshko, D. I. Pustakhod +1 more

In this report we present a comprehensive statistical analysis of experimentally measured time intervals between spontaneous polarization switchings in a bistable VCSEL from standpoint of a possibility to generate random numbers. We propose an effective and robust algorithm of conversion of residence times into truly random binary numbers. This algorithm allows one to avoid the problem of biasing in the output bit stream as well as to obtain low correlation between bits.

Yuncai Wang