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 ...

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 ...

If your name gets picked for jury duty, it’s because a computer used a random number generator to select it. The same goes for tax audits or when you opt for a quick pick lottery ticket. But how can ...

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.

Many popular random number generators (RNGs) are based on classical computer algorithms and have the advantage of being fast and easy to implement. The best examples pass many statistical tests ...

The static from a old radio is a form of random interference caused by electromagnetic activity in the atmosphere (Credit: Getty Images) Our world runs on randomly generated numbers and without them a ...