One of the pieces of equipment for the quantum random number generator in the NIST Boulder laboratories. Very little in this life is truly random. A coin flip is influenced by the flipper’s force, its ...

Quick! Think of a number between 1 and 10…was it 7? If it was, don't feel too bad, as human brains are notoriously bad at both true randomness and understanding probability. Even if you're too ...

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 ...

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 ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

Cloudflare is one of those Internet companies you use all the time, but don’t usually know it. Big websites you visit use Cloudflare to shore up their defenses against denial of service attacks. The ...

Random number generators aren’t just some niche toy of interest only to mathematicians. They’re also crucial to keeping our computer systems safe from hackers and those who would seek to do us harm.

The Energy Department has technology that can generate random number sequences, and now it wants to commercialize it. It’s incredibly difficult to create a truly random sequence of numbers—often ...

Lotteries, accidents and rolls of dice — the world around us is full of unpredictable events. Yet generating a truly random series of numbers for encryption has remained a surprisingly difficult task.

Cloudflare is one of those Internet companies you use all the time, but don’t usually know it. Big websites you visit use Cloudflare to shore up their defenses against denial of service attacks. The ...

Nanoscale device employs magnetic tunnel junctions to convert thermal noise into binary signals for random number generation.

Now when you curse the RNG gods, you can really mean it. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Add us as a preferred source on Google ...