(Busà Photography/Moment/Getty Images) One of the hardest things to do in physics is to generate true, provably unpredictable ...

Creating perfect randomness is surprisingly difficult. Even modern random number generators never generate completely ideal ...

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 ...

Ask a designer or artist if any aspect of their process is random. The answer will likely reveal a complex relationship between human cognition, digital media, authorship, and even conceptions of ...

Computers are known to be precise and — usually — repeatable. That’s why it is so hard to get something that seems random out of them. Yet random things are great for games, encryption, and multimedia ...

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 ...

David Dias is a research engineer at Protocol Labs. He specializes in peer-to-peer networking and distributed systems. Electricity, water, gas – these are just some of the public utilities we use ...

Researchers have uncovered deep connections among different types of random objects, illuminating hidden geometric structures. These are not the kinds of objects that concern Scott Sheffield.