The algorithm (Italian) that gives the numbers: the invention saves the e-commerce – Intelligonews

There is still one thing that the all-powerful tools today do not know yet. An operation that, for once, is easy for a man but impossible for a machine: create a random number . We can do this, for example, by pulling a given. Not so the computer. From today, however, the “ pseudorandom number ” generated by Internet will be a bit ‘more random … and this is thanks to an Italian mind. We try to understand more.

A new algorithm, developed by mathematician Sebastiano Vigna University of Milan, has been adopted by major browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Safari . Its installation on electronic devices allow you to fix a problem in JavaScript , the language used by all web pages to create dynamic effects. It is a “bug” on the pseudorandom number generation, required for example to identify transactions in the online shopping or introduce randomness in games. If it seems too abstract, consider the extraction of lottery tickets or distributing the cards in online poker. Now, what would happen if the programs charge to develop such numerical sequences unpredictably had a tendency to give a little ‘too often the same numbers? It would indeed be quite a problem. Now, it seems that this is exactly what happened so far.

” generate numbers randomly – says Vigna – it is difficult and very expensive. For this since the forties have developed algorithms to compute deterministically mimicking the randomness of the numbers that can be achieved only with physical processes (such as throwing a dice) but that would be too expensive to reproduce on a large scale to generate the millions of random bits per second of which is needed on the web ”. Now, the algorithm that until last month gave sequences of pseudorandom numbers to common browsers (Chrome, Safari and Firefox) was not just an inconvenience. To discover it was an agency that deals with online gambling: it is seen that the algorithm extracted similar numbers more often than might be expected, threatening to identify two different bets with the same sequence of numbers. Problem solved, however, with the algorithm xorshift128 + created by Vigna, whose code will be installed and run on the vast majority of terminals (phones, tablets and PCs) exist.