Using games to understand and create randomness

Jaak Henno, Hannu Jaakkola, Jukka Mäkelä

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionScientificpeer-review

    2 Citations (Scopus)
    16 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    Massive growth of data and communication encryption has created growing need for non-predictable, random data, needed for encryption keys creation. Need for randomness grows (nearly) linearly with growth of encryption, but randomness is very important ingredient also e.g. in quickly growing industry of game programming. Computers are deterministic devices and cannot create random results, computer procedures can generate only pseudo-random (looking random) data. For true randomness is needed some outside information - time and placement of user's keystrokes, fluctuations of current, interrupt requests in computer processor etc. But even those sources can often not comply with requests from our increasingly randomness-hunger environment of ciphered communications and data. Growing need for randomness has created a market of randomness sources; new sources are proposed constantly. These sources differ in their properties (ease of access, size of required software etc.) and in ease of estimating their quality. However, there is an easily available good source for comparing quality of randomness and also creating new randomness - computer games. The growing affectionateness of users to play digital games makes this activity very attractive for comparing quality of randomness sources and using as a source of new randomness. In the following are analyzed possibilities for investigating and extracting randomness from digital gameplay and demonstrated some experiments with simple stateless games which allow to compare existing sources of (pseudo) randomness and generate new randomness, which can be used e.g. to create cyphering keys in mobile and Internet of Things devices.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationSQAMIA 2018 - Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Software Quality Analysis, Monitoring, Improvement, and Applications
    PublisherCEUR-WS
    Volume2217
    ISBN (Print)9788670314733
    Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2018
    Publication typeA4 Article in conference proceedings
    EventWorkshop on Software Quality Analysis, Monitoring, Improvement, and Applications - Novi Sad, Serbia
    Duration: 27 Aug 201830 Aug 2018

    Publication series

    NameCEUR workshop proceedings
    ISSN (Electronic)1613-0073

    Conference

    ConferenceWorkshop on Software Quality Analysis, Monitoring, Improvement, and Applications
    Country/TerritorySerbia
    CityNovi Sad
    Period27/08/1830/08/18

    Publication forum classification

    • Publication forum level 1

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • General Computer Science

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