There will be an app for that: making random numbers on a mobile phone. (Courtesy: Marketa Michalkova) Do you feel nervous when you make a credit-card transaction using your mobile phone? Your worries ...

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 ...

The quest for true randomness has roots in cryptography and is a rabbit hole that gets surprisingly deep with alarmingly ...

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 ...

“This is a marvelous step” toward more efficient random number generation, says Rajarshi Roy, a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park who was not involved in the work. Random number ...

Researchers have built the fastest random-number generator ever made, using a simple laser. It exploits fluctuations in the intensity of light to generate randomness—a coveted resource in applications ...

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 ...

Random numbers are essential for secure cyber communications. But making truly random numbers is harder than it seems. Now scientists have devised a way to make the most random random numbers ever. A ...