Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek explores the secrets of the cosmos. Read previous columns here. Many summers ago, I discovered a book called “A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal ...

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 ...

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 ...

Random numbers are a precious commodity, whether expressed as strings of decimal digits or simply 1s and 0s. Computer scientist George Marsaglia of Florida State University, however, likes giving them ...

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 ...

A compounding technique first used to produce random binary digits is generalized and extended to other number systems. Formulae for the rate of convergence of probabilities to the desired values are ...

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 ...

Random number generation is an essential feature in Excel, allowing users to perform tasks such as simulations, creating test datasets, or experimenting with spreadsheet models. Excel provides three ...

According to this post on the official V8 Javascript blog, the pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) that V8 Javascript uses in Math.random() is horribly flawed and getting replaced with something a ...