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 ...

When a computer generates a “random” number, it goes through certain algorithms that will allow it to come up with that number, which means it wasn’t really random after all. Random numbers are ...

“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 ...

A software routine that produces a random number. Used in applications such as computer games and cryptographic key generation, random numbers are easily created in a computer due to many random ...

With a laser, a mirror and some simple calculations, researchers have created a fast, reliable way to produce long strings of random numbers. This speedy method, reported in the July 10 Physical ...

Whenever we need to communicate in secret, a cryptographic key is needed. For this key to work, it must consist of numbers chosen at random without any structure – just the opposite of using the ...

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.

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 ...