Mathematicians were able to discover a pattern for prime numbers, which have long been recognized as very random. The discovery increases the understanding of prime number behavior and may contribute ...

April 26, 2005 Pi seems a good random number generator – but not always the best WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – If you wanted a random number, historically you could do worse than to pick a sequence from the ...

Even though rand() may be a good enough random number generator for making a video game, the patterns of random bits it spits out may not be sufficient for applications requiring truly random data.… ...

One unusual approach to random number generation involves lava lamps. By using an algorithm, the complex patterns of lava lamps can be recorded and, by visual data changed into a random number.

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… ...

To foil would-be hackers, computer systems need to generate sequences of random numbers. Some systems use what’s known as pseudo-random numbers, which are actually complex patterns that begin with a ...

The result, a little less than seven minutes later, is 512 random bits of binary code – the equivalent of 2 (a number 155 digits long) possible random numbers.

Yet in an uncanny number of real-world data sets, an astonishing 30.1 percent of the entries begin with a 1, 17.6 percent begin with a 2, and so on. This phenomenon is known as Benford's law.

Fast randomness A diagram of the quantum random number generator on the photonic integrated chip. (Courtesy: Bing Bai and Yao Zheng) Smartphones could soon come equipped with a quantum-powered source ...