You sit back, hit spin, and watch the reels roll. There’s excitement, suspense, maybe even a little superstition. But behind every spin in real cash slots, there’s cold, hard math. Behind the curtain ...

In the real world, probability is a tough thing to characterize. If I roll a die, what does it mean to say that it has a one-sixth chance of coming up 5? We say that the outcome is random because we ...

According to this post on the official V8 Javascript blog, the pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) that V8 Javascript uses in Math.random() is horribly flawed and getting replaced with something a ...

A quantum random-number generator has been developed that uses classical cryptography to certify that its output was produced by a quantum process. A truly random number is generated by a process ...

If you want to start an argument in certain circles, claim to have a random number generation algorithm. Turns out that producing real random numbers is hard, which is why people often turn to strange ...

Randomness can be a Good Thing. If your system generates truly random numbers, it can avoid and withstand network packet collisions just one of many applications. Here's what you need to know about ...

Over the years, multiple studies have found that Google Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine was returning not-so-random numbers when you called the Math.random() function. Today that’s been fixed, with the ...

Last week, Yitang “Tom” Zhang, a popular math professor at the University of New Hampshire, stunned the world of pure mathematics when he announced that he had proven the “bounded gaps” conjecture ...

Peter Bierhorst’s machine is no pinnacle of design. Nestled in the Rocky Mountains inside a facility for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the photon-generating behemoth spans an ...