Random CPU

Deep Learning Neural Networks

I keep seeing news about something awesome that a computer has been “trained” to do with “deep learning”. These news spiels refer to something called “Q Learning”, “Deep Learning Neural Networks”, or “Hierarchical Learning”.

Although these are huge terms, it’s a pretty simple idea as to how they work. In this article, we cover some of the basics of this genre of algorithm.

About Pseudo Random Number Generators

Pseudo Random Number Generators, or PRNGs, are extremely important, as randomness is needed by computers for many purposes. As computers are “deterministic” machines, meaning they follow a specific procedure for everything, they are terrible at making randomness. Because of this, there has been an enormous amount of studying on how to simulate randomness on computers. The algorithms that are developed to simulate randomness are called PRNGs.

Websites that use TLS/SSL (to get the lock symbol in the address bar) use randomness to establish a secure connection to someone visiting their website. If they didn’t use randomness, and used a non-random encryption key with someone who visited their website, then any malicious actor could visit the website, and get the same encryption and decryption key as you got. This would allow a hacker to decrypt your communications with the website. Imagine if this could occur with your banking website, and it becomes clear why this is important.

All About Certificate Authorities

A “Certificate Authority” (CA), is a idea of “Public Key Infrastructure” (PKI), in which a special type of certificate is able to essentially co-sign other certificates to verify them as valid and trustworthy to certain levels.

Although CAs are generally trusted, there are non-trusted CAs. These CAs typically exist in corporate networks, in which their computers trust the CA, but others don’t. For example, a large company will have internal servers that need to be secured using SSL/TLS, but since nobody outside of the company ever accesses these systems, no computers outside of the company trusts this CA.

Root CA Thoughts

A root CA is a certificate authority (CA) that doesn’t have any parent CAs. The root CAs are pretty interesting, because root CAs are CAs that are typically ultimately trusted, with the ability to sign intermediate CAs.