If you want to pick a winner in a drawing, take samples for statistical purposes, or any of hundreds of other technical tasks you are going to need a source of random numbers. If you have ever looked ...

A team of researchers have published a paper in which they show that a quantum computer can produce certified randomness, which has numerous application areas such as in cryptography. According to the ...

Randomness would seem to make a mathematical statement harder to prove. In fact, it often does the opposite. Of all the tools available to the mathematician, randomness would seem to offer little ...

Ask a computer to pick a random number and you’ll probably get a response that isn’t completely unpredictable. Because they are deterministic automatons, computers struggle to generate numbers that ...

Electricity, water, gas – these are just some of the public utilities we use every day, whether for cooking food in the morning, heating homes throughout the day, or charging computers at night. But ...

Humans find the concept of randomness very hard to understand, and this can get us into big trouble. Randomness fools us all Here's a party trick. Get two friends. One will flip a coin 30 times and ...

In last month’s Insights column, we explored randomness in mundane objects such as a combination bicycle lock and a hexagonal jigsaw puzzle, before debating the philosophical underpinnings of ...

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries. (A.A. Milne) If you were a rabbit, fleeing from a fox, would you be more successful if following a ...