Randomness is incredibly useful. People often draw straws, throw dice or flip coins to make fair choices. Random numbers can enable auditors to make completely unbiased selections. Randomness is also ...

If you want to start an argument in certain circles, claim to have a random number generation algorithm. Turns out that producing real random numbers is hard, which is why people often turn to strange ...

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 ...

Whether it’s a game of D&D or encrypting top-secret information, a wide array of methods are available for generating the needed random numbers with high enough entropy for their use case. For a ...

A quantum random-number generator has been developed that uses classical cryptography to certify that its output was produced by a quantum process. A truly random number is generated by a process ...

Eeny, meeny, miny, mo, catch a tiger by the toe – so the rhyme goes. But even children know that counting-out rhymes like this are no help at making a truly random choice. Perhaps you remember when ...

RANDOMNESS IS A valuable commodity. Computer models of complex systems ranging from the weather to the stockmarket are voracious consumers of random numbers. Cryptography, too, relies heavily on ...

Microsoft Excel can do a lot of cool things. If you need it to generate random numbers, Susan Harkins can show you how. Over the last few months, I’ve written about several of Excel’s new dynamic ...