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 ...

A team of international scientists has developed a laser that can generate 254 trillion random digits per second, more than a hundred times faster than computer-based random number generators (RNG).

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 ...

The quest for true randomness has roots in cryptography and is a rabbit hole that gets surprisingly deep with alarmingly rapidity. Still, the generation of random-enough numbers is a popular hacker ...

There will be an app for that: making random numbers on a mobile phone. (Courtesy: Marketa Michalkova) Do you feel nervous when you make a credit-card transaction using your mobile phone? Your worries ...

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 ...

Using a single, chip-scale laser, scientists have managed to generate streams of completely random numbers at about 100 times the speed of the fastest random-numbers generator systems that are ...

Physicists have completed a study comparing the "randomness" in pi to that produced by random number generators. They have found that while sequences of digits from pi are indeed an acceptable ...