The math behind all the discussion of tonight’s Powerball drawing assumes true randomness – equal likelihood for each number to be chosen, both in the drawing itself and, crucially, in the process of ...

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 ...

“This is a marvelous step” toward more efficient random number generation, says Rajarshi Roy, a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park who was not involved in the work. Random number ...

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 ...

In September 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that American and British intelligence agencies had successfully cracked much of the online encryption internet users used to keep their ...