Quantum Effects Exploited to Generate Random Numbers

A team of researchers has devised perhaps the world's most intricate coin toss, a device utilizing vacuum chambers, magnetic fields, lasers and microwave pulses to produce a random string of 0s and 1s--each representing heads or tails, essentially. The complexity is necessary to move the generation of random numbers beyond the hard-to-predict but fundamentally deterministic world of classical physics and into the realm of quantum mechanics, where uncertainty takes hold. [More]

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