Generating random numbers might seem like a trivial task, that is until the numbers need to be truly random for cryptography or security reasons. When that’s the case, it turns out that these numbers ...

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 ...

Random Number Generators (RNG) are currently the tech used to determine the fate of gamblers. If you think about the amount of money that can be won in various progressive jackpots, you will realize ...

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.

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).

Whenever we need to communicate in secret, a cryptographic key is needed. For this key to work, it must consist of numbers chosen at random without any structure – just the opposite of using the ...

Peter Bierhorst’s machine is no pinnacle of design. Nestled in the Rocky Mountains inside a facility for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the photon-generating behemoth spans an ...

Samsung has a solid track record with smartphone security, but it has upped the ante with its latest offering: the Galaxy Quantum 2. This includes something called a quantum random number generator ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...