[HN Gopher] Show HN: Lava lamp simulated by neural net in infini...
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Show HN: Lava lamp simulated by neural net in infinite loop
duralava is a neural network which can simulate a lava lamp in an
infinite loop. It uses a recurrent GAN that learns the physical
behavior of the lava lamp. A noteworthy aspect is that can
generate an arbitrarily long video of a (virtual) lava lamp,
without diverging even after thousands of frames.
Author : muxamilian
Score : 48 points
Date : 2022-02-05 15:52 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| uoaei wrote:
| Maybe I am confused. Is it simulating a lava lamp, or a video of
| a lava lamp?
| anu7df wrote:
| If i am remembering correctly, there was a company that was using
| videos of lava lamps for encryption or as passwords or some such.
| The claim was that it is un crackable because truly random. I
| wonder if this can be used to emulate the physical process and
| break that encryption.
| muxamilian wrote:
| Cloudflare does that: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-
| gb/learning/ssl/lava-lamp-encr...
|
| That's an interesting aspect, which I haven't thought of. I
| think real world lava lamps have very chaotic behavior. I think
| the neural network, however, just learns the most common
| behaviors of a lava lamp but so far cannot learn every aspect
| of a lava lamp. Training a bigger neural network could work
| though...
| btrettel wrote:
| Similating a Lava lamp with ML doesn't affect the security of
| RNGs in my view. You could do a computer simulation of a Lava
| lamp with the Navier-Stokes equations for a long time now.
| Chaos theory would mean that predicting the long-term future of
| a particular realization would require extremely high precision
| measurements of the initial conditions and boundary conditions
| of the lamp, certainly beyond what is feasible and possibly
| beyond what is possible. ML doesn't change that fact. It is
| possible, however, to predict statistics but that wouldn't be
| useful to break encryption.
| [deleted]
| webmaven wrote:
| _> If i am remembering correctly, there was a company that was
| using videos of lava lamps for encryption or as passwords or
| some such._
|
| The method dates back to SGI's Lavarand:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand
|
| A related system, LavaRnd uses webcams that have their lenscaps
| on, so the sensors are only detecting thermal noise:
|
| https://www.lavarand.org/
|
| But Cloudflare is the most famous implementor of the technique:
|
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/randomness-101-lavarand-in-produ...
|
| ISTR that US embassies tried using atmospheric noise as a seed
| for generating one-time pads at some point, but that was
| deprecated as being too vulnerable to undetectable outside
| interference.
|
| By comparison, the Cloudflare system with the lava lamps in the
| lobby is tamper-evident.
|
| _> The claim was that it is un crackable because truly random.
| I wonder if this can be used to emulate the physical process
| and break that encryption._
|
| No. Chaotic processes are so sensitive to initial conditions
| and perturbations from the environment that any simulation
| quickly diverges from the actual process being simulated. Other
| common macroscale systems that exhibit this property are the
| three body problem and double pendulums.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Note that this method generate a video that looks nice and is
| very similar to a lava lamp, but it's not a 100% pixel perfect
| simulation of a lava lamp.
|
| I'm not sure if you can use an image or short video as a seed,
| but in case it's possible, the rest of the real video and the
| rest of the video generated by this will look similar for a
| short time, but after a while they will be more and more
| different.
|
| It's similar to turning on two lamps of the same factory at the
| same time. In spite they look similar initially, after a while
| they will look different.
|
| In particular a real lamp will get some vibration the cars in
| the streets that will affect the content just a little, but
| after a while the chaotic behavior will make the differences
| bigger. Also small temperature differences from the sunlight
| from the window, and other stuff that looks unimportant will
| cause the real lamp to have a unpredictable behavior after some
| time.
| thunderbong wrote:
| Past threads -
|
| Cloudflare generating Pseudo-random numbers from 100 lava lamps
| (4 years ago - 4 comments - gizmodo.com)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15639320
|
| Lavarand - Hardware random number generator using lava lamps
| (11 years ago - 0 comments - wikipedia.org)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15639320
|
| Relevant website -
|
| LavaRnd
|
| http://www.lavarnd.org/lavarnd.html
| pavlov wrote:
| I remember hearing this in the late '90s, and the company using
| "camera pointed at lava lamp" as a random number seed was SGI.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Fun project, even though I personally find the gan images
| unconvincing; too many deconvolution artifacts, and poor
| conservation of mass as another commenter said.
|
| I am however completely awed by the folder in that git repo with
| 143.000 png files. Checking that into git would have turned my
| laptop itself into a molten blob of wax, haha.
|
| Edit: rereading my comment, maybe it sounds harsh. Idon't wanna
| sound like I'm dissing this, GANs are hard and so is image
| generation. I couldn't have done it better.
|
| Also: nice trick on penalizing poor (growing) noise vectors;
| another thing you could try is simply always sample a random
| point on an n-sphere (you divide your random vector by its
| length, it'll always have length 1)
| Moosdijk wrote:
| It does not do it convincingly. At least the gifs on github show
| blobs of lava disappearing mid rise.
|
| It's nice work though.
| klyrs wrote:
| Maybe it's just me, but conservation of mass seems like
| something you'd want to hard-code, not learn.
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