The Economist (US), May 31st, 1997
Mathematician Landon Noll and others have conceived the idea of using lava lamps to help computers produce sequences of random numbers. The 'lava' inside a lamp moves in a truly random manner while computers are precise and are innately unable to create such random numbers.
LAVA lamps the cylinders of meandering coloured blobs that illuminated a million bachelor pads until the style police arrived to arrest their owners at the end of the 1970s might not seem to have any conceivable useful function. But a group of researchers at Silicon Graphics, a Californian computer firm, appears to have st...
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