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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

“To swim against the current of human intuition is a difficult task. ... the human mind is built to identify for each event a definite cause and can, therefore, have a hard time accepting the ...

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 ...

Are you convinced that the shuffle mode on your iPod is messing with your mind? Or that certain numbers are bound to come up in the next lottery? If yes, you may be holding on to some serious ...

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 ...

These are not the kinds of objects that concern Scott Sheffield. Sheffield, a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studies shapes that are constructed by random ...

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 ...