(www.valerionappi.it) Generating true random numbers from bananas - Valerio Nappi

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It was a dreary afternoon in Milan last year when, procrastinating on studying, I was struck by a flash of genius. “/What would happen if I made a banana-powered random number generator?/“. I immediately went to tell my roommate, who was also an electronic engineer. He looked me in the face and burst out laughing. At that moment I realized that I had a great project in my hands.

Before being taken for a fool: it really does make sense, and this post is here to explain it to you. Let's start at the root of the problem: computers are deterministic systems. Put in a less complicated way, if we always give them the same input data, they always return the same output values. Which is exactly what we expect from a computer. It is clear from the start, however, that determinism and randomness are not great friends. In fact, a computer, per se, is not capable of doing anything random.