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 ...

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 ...

Sometimes you need random numbers — and properly random ones, at that. Hackaday Alum [Sean Boyce] whipped up a rig that serves up just that, tasty random bytes delivered fresh over MQTT. [Sean] tells ...

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 ...

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 ...

A set of values or elements that is statistically random, but it is derived from a known starting point and is typically repeated over and over. Pseudo-random numbers provide necessary values for ...