MADS Haahr is in no doubt. "Generating randomness is not a task that should be left to humans," he says.
You might expect him to say that. A computer scientist at Trinity College Dublin, he is the creator of a popular online random number generator, hosted at random.org. But he has a point.
Human brains are wired to spot and generate patterns. That is useful when it's all about seeing predators on the savannah before they see you, but it handicaps us when we need to think in random and unpredictable ways. That's a problem, because true randomness is a useful thing to have. Random numbers are used in cryptography, computing, design and many other applications. Our inability to "do" random means that we usually have to outsource it to machines.
But relying on outside sources of randomness has its ...
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