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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Haahr knew that they would need to be able to generate reliably random numbers. Endless streams of digits that would determine what slots came up when you yanked the virtual lever, or what cards got ...

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 ...

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 ...

A compounding technique first used to produce random binary digits is generalized and extended to other number systems. Formulae for the rate of convergence of probabilities to the desired values are ...

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 ...

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 ...