If you want to pick a winner in a drawing, take samples for statistical purposes, or any of hundreds of other technical tasks you are going to need a source of random numbers. If you have ever looked ...

What do you do, when you need a random number in your programming? The chances are that you reach for your environment’s function to do the job, usually something like rand() or similar. This returns ...

Computers are known to be precise and — usually — repeatable. That’s why it is so hard to get something that seems random out of them. Yet random things are great for games, encryption, and multimedia ...

Randomness is powerful. Think about a presidential poll: A random sample of just 400 people in the United States can accurately estimate Clinton’s and Trump’s support to within 5 percent (with 95 ...

Fast randomness A diagram of the quantum random number generator on the photonic integrated chip. (Courtesy: Bing Bai and Yao Zheng) Smartphones could soon come equipped with a quantum-powered source ...

Encryption systems rely on “random” numbers, but conventional computers can’t generate them perfectly. New research shows that quantum physics can.

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A random sequence of zeroes ...

Researchers have uncovered deep connections among different types of random objects, illuminating hidden geometric structures. These are not the kinds of objects that concern Scott Sheffield.

David Dias is a research engineer at Protocol Labs. He specializes in peer-to-peer networking and distributed systems. Electricity, water, gas – these are just some of the public utilities we use ...

These are not the kinds of objects that concern Scott Sheffield. Sheffield, a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studies shapes that are constructed by random ...