WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – If you wanted a random number, historically you could do worse than to pick a sequence from the string of digits in pi. But Purdue University scientists now say other sources ...

In computer security, random numbers are crucial values that must be unpredictable—such as secret keys or initialization vectors (IVs)—forming the foundation of security systems. To achieve this, ...

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 ...

Many languages feature a random number generator library for help with tasks like rolling a die or flipping a coin. Why, you may ask, is this necessary when humans are perfectly capable of randomly ...

Are Powerball Drawings and 'Quick Pick' Numbers Really Random? The math behind all the discussion of tonight's Powerball drawing assumes true randomness – equal likelihood for each number to be chosen ...

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 ...

The math behind all the discussion of tonight’s Powerball drawing assumes true randomness – equal likelihood for each number to be chosen, both in the drawing itself and, crucially, in the process of ...