Member-only story

The League of Entropy Is Making Randomness Truly Random

Creating reliably random numbers isn’t as easy as you think, but a new alliance of organizations and individuals is decentralizing randomness for more equitable and trustworthy applications

Rina Diane Caballar
OneZero
7 min readAug 7, 2019

Illustration: Jinhwa Jang

InIn August 2017, Eddie Tipton was convicted for masterminding one of the biggest lottery scams in the U.S. As the Multi-State Lottery Association’s former information security director, Tipton had access to the software generating random numbers for the lottery. He inserted extra lines of code so when certain conditions were met, the algorithm would follow a different path, producing a smaller, more predictable set of winning lottery numbers. Tipton rigged six winning drawings across five different U.S. states amounting to a total of more than $24 million in prize money.

From lotteries and elections to cryptography and quantum mechanics, randomness plays a critical role in ensuring fairness — but only if the source of randomness can be trusted at all times. This may not always be the case for a single source, which could have its own bias or could be influenced by outside forces, as seen in Tipton’s lottery rigging. And this is where decentralization comes in, providing distributed sources of unbiased…

Create an account to read the full story.

The author made this story available to Medium members only.
If you’re new to Medium, create a new account to read this story on us.

Or, continue in mobile web

Already have an account? Sign in

OneZero
OneZero

Published in OneZero

OneZero is a former publication from Medium about the impact of technology on people and the future. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Rina Diane Caballar
Rina Diane Caballar

Written by Rina Diane Caballar

Filipina. Freelance writer. Chocoholic. Words @ The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, BBC Travel, and more.

Responses (3)

What are your thoughts?

With quick analysis, this looks like reverse block chain. Consensus of participants create a random number. Everybody verifies it is properly generated and random. New random numbers are build from that consensus.
I probably simplifying this too much.
Interesting concept.

1

Wow! Excellent journalism! Thanks for this terrific story. I was especially surprised to learn that Alan Turing designed a random number generator into his Manchester Electronic Computer Mark II, based on resistance noise.