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 ...

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 ...

Quantum physics can be exploited to generate true random numbers, which have important roles in many applications, especially in cryptography. Genuine randomness from the measurement of a quantum ...

PORTLAND, Ore. —Random numbers are usually not really random, since the methods by which a truly random number can be generated are few, far between and very slow to calculate. As a result, most ...

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 ...

Randomness can be a Good Thing. If your system generates truly random numbers, it can avoid and withstand network packet collisions just one of many applications. Here's what you need to know about ...

In the real world, probability is a tough thing to characterize. If I roll a die, what does it mean to say that it has a one-sixth chance of coming up 5? We say that the outcome is random because we ...

Skyrmions, tiny magnetic anomalies that arise in two-dimensional materials, can be used to generate true random numbers useful in cryptography and probabilistic computing. Whether for use in ...