R interface to a free quantum random number service, based on the quantum randomness of photon arrival times, hosted by the Humboldt university in Berlin.
You need to register for this site, but the random numbers are for free. The registration serves the purpose of avoiding that a single user dominates the download bandwidth.
The package is not on CRAN because of its dependency on the binary libQRNG library, binary executable code is not allowed in CRAN source packages. After logging in, the required libQRNG library can be downloaded.
You can install the shared library (.dll or .so) in an appropriate directory. For linux, take the following steps:
- install the
.sofile in/usr/local/lib - make sure that
/etc/ld.so.confcontains/usr/local/lib, or if it refers to files included that one of these files contain it - run
sudo ldconfig, or on systems withoutsudorunldconfigas root.
Make sure that package devtools is installed, otherwise install it with
install.packages("devtools")
and then install directly from github:
library(devtools)
install_github("edzer/qrng")
> library(qrng)
get quantum random numbers:
> quantum_runif(10, user = "edzer", password = "YourPW")
[1] 0.20538839 0.90860514 0.17295354 0.32030059 0.36653032 0.94955527
[7] 0.35582723 0.88221983 0.29111428 0.09642045
get a quantum integer, to be used as random seed:
> QRNG_seed("edzer", "YourPW")
[1] -1438960125
set currend RNG seed with a new quantum value:
> set.seed(QRNG_seed("edzer", "YourPW"))
what is the current RNG?
> RNGkind()
[1] "Mersenne-Twister" "Inversion"
change it into using the QRNG:
> setup_QRNG(user = "edzer", password = "YourPW", ssl = TRUE, 1e4)
> RNGkind()
[1] "user-supplied" "Inversion"
user-supplied means we now obtain QRNG numbers by calling:
> runif(10)
[1] 0.4278956 0.3804281 0.8409188 0.6872713 0.7990998 0.1479594 0.2394953
[8] 0.7209651 0.8623249 0.9671532
note that this sequence is unique and non-reproducible by construction. Using set.seed does
not have any effect when using this RNG.