The company needed some truly random numbers for its security solutions, so it turned to some groovy old tech: lava lamps. In their office is a wall of 100 lava lamps monitored by cameras.

Random number generator 'improved' 17 May 2016 Thinkstock Computers have trouble generating truly random numbers - but a new method could help ...

That means that even if some enemy understands everything about how the random number generator works, they still can’t predict the outcome.

To fix the bug Google needed to switch to a new pseudo-random number generator called xorshift128+ which fixes the not-quite-random problem found in the older MWC1616 algorithm.

That’s exactly how the world’s only commercially available quantum random number generator works. But its speed is limited to about one megabit per second.