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 ...

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.

Random number sequences are essential to a host of encryption schemes. But true randomness in the strict sense is not possible in the classical world; it only occurs in quantum-mechanical processes.

A new network paradigm can generate meaningfully random numbers—and fast. In network encryption, randomness has huge value because it’s not “solvable” by hackers. Classical computers can’t be ...

Quantum physics can be exploited to generate true random numbers, which have important roles in many applications, especially in cryptography. Genuine randomness from the measurement of a quantum ...

The static from a old radio is a form of random interference caused by electromagnetic activity in the atmosphere (Credit: Getty Images) Our world runs on randomly generated numbers and without them a ...

Because computers don't understand words or phrases in the same way people can, they speak a language of their own, using only two symbols: 0 and 1. This computing parlance is known as binary code, ...