RANDOM NUMBERS QUANTUM : COMPUTER LAB SCIENCE

Nebulous Numbers : It's totally random. And that's a good thing : Researchers in Switzerland labored for 10 years, on a project that cost $12 million.

The end result, published in science journal Nature this past spring? Some really, really random numbers.

Random numbers are the guardians of digital information, which moves through the internet via a system of public and private keys. Private keys consist of hundreds of bits [ bits are zeros or ones that encode extremely large numbers ] generated by a computer.

Computers can come very close to achieving true randomness, but they are driven by process.

A process can be complex and hard to tease out, but it cannot be truly random.

'' If you knew what the computer was calculating, you would be able to predict it exactly, '' said Morgan W. Mitchell of the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona.

'' You would be able to say exactly what's going to come out.'' Hackers have become adept at using math to probe encrypted systems for signs of weak randomness, which can give access to private keys.

The Swiss tackled the process through a process called randomness amplification, which takes lower-grade random numbers and boosts them via quantum physics.

The result is random numbers that are '' effectively perfect, '' said Dr. Mitchell, who was not part of the Swiss team.

Others have also attained impressive results when it comes to random number generation, but with more reliance on computers, whereas the Swiss experiment comes with an elegant validation independent of processing power.

The resulting paper '' represents the most convincing demonstration to date that high quality  randomness can be produced from quantum processes, '' said Roger Colbeck, a professor of quantum information theory at King's College, London and a pioneer in the field of quantum randomness.

The Swiss Project called for connected refrigerators operating at just above absolute ZERO, at 15 millikelvin, roughly 180 times colder than deep space.

THESE CRYOSTATS, as they are known, cooled circuits called qubits, which behave according to quantum mechanics.

!WOW! thanks Alexander Nazaryan.