Computers are known to be precise and — usually — repeatable. That’s why it is so hard to get something that seems random out of them. Yet random things are great for games, encryption, and multimedia ...

Random numbers are increasingly important to our digitally connected world, with applications that include e-commerce, cryptography, and cloud computing. Producing a large amount of truly random ...

Randomness is a slippery concept, defying precise definition. A simple example of a random series is provided by repeatedly tossing a coin. Assigning “1” for heads and “0” for tails, we generate a ...

You indirectly use random numbers online every day—to establish secure connections, to encrypt data, perhaps even to satisfy your gambling problem. But their ubiquity belies the fact that they’re ...

Mathematicians concerned with cryptography need novel ways of generating random numbers in order to securely transmit data such as a credit card number or especially private email. But it's hard for ...

Random numbers are invaluable. They're used in the encryption that makes online banking secure. Economists, physicists, pollsters, and casinos rely on them. Yet until recently, producing large sets of ...

Even though rand() may be a good enough random number generator for making a video game, the patterns of random bits it spits out may not be sufficient for applications requiring truly random data.

Random numbers are a precious commodity, whether expressed as strings of decimal digits or simply 1s and 0s. Computer scientist George Marsaglia of Florida State University, however, likes giving them ...

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek explores the secrets of the cosmos. Read previous columns here. Many summers ago, I discovered a book called “A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal ...

Random numbers are essential for secure cyber communications. But making truly random numbers is harder than it seems. Now scientists have devised a way to make the most random random numbers ever. A ...