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 ...

A team of international scientists has developed a laser that can generate 254 trillion random digits per second, more than a hundred times faster than computer-based random number generators (RNG).

Random numbers are crucial for computing, but our current algorithms aren’t truly random. Researchers at Brown University have now found a way to tap into the fluctuations of skyrmions to generate ...

To simulate chance occurrences, a computer can’t literally toss a coin or roll a die. Instead, it relies on special numerical recipes for generating strings of shuffled digits that pass for random ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Finding π using random numbers and probability. This short demonstrates a Monte Carlo approach, showing how randomness and statistics can converge to an accurate estimate of pi through repeated trials ...

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 ...