Ernie, the premium bond number generator, takes a quantum leap on Friday as the fifth incarnation of the machine is launched, running at speeds 21,000 times faster than the original 1956 model developed by Bletchley Park codebreakers.
Ernie 5 – the name stands for Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment – will for the first time use quantum technology to produce random numbers through light, replacing the previous “thermal noise” method. It will sift through the 79bn premium bonds in existence to produce 3m winners in just 12 minutes each month.
Meanwhile Ernie 4 will be packed off to retirement at Bletchley Park’s National Museum of Computing. When it was launched in 2004, Ernie 4 was at the forefront of technology, with observers marvelling at how it was no larger than a DVD player compared with the first Ernie, which was the size of a van.
But in recent years Ernie 4 has been taking nine hours to crunch the numbers, as sales of premium bonds have soared. The new Ernie’s quantum chip can process the numbers 45 times faster, yet is only the size of a pea.
The five Ernies chart the postwar history of technology – and financial inflation. The concept for the very first Ernie was created by Tommy Flowers, builder of the codebreaking Colossus during the second world war and regarded as one of the giants of early computing alongside Alan Turing.
When the postmaster general, Ernest Marples, gave the go-ahead for the first premium bond prize draws (NS&I insists it was a myth that the machine was named after him), the top prize was £1,000 compared with the £1m jackpots paid out today. But even the £1,000 was considered controversial, with critics such as Harold Wilson concerned that it was a form of gambling rather than saving.
Ernie 2 (1973-88) was designed to look like one of the sets from the James Bond movie Goldfinger, and churned through bonds worth at the time a total of £1bn. Today, the value of premium bonds issued has soared to £79.6bn.
The latest Ernie has been developed a long way from Bletchley Park. It has been built by ID Quantique (IDQ), a Swiss company founded in 2001 by four scientists from the University of Geneva who anticipated the impact of quantum physics on information technology. It has received several rounds of funding from the South Korean telecommunications giant SK Telecom.
Since they first began operating, the five Ernies have generated the numbers for more than 432m prizes totalling £19.2bn, and created 406 millionaires.
