Excel provides three functions for generating random values: RAND(), RANDARRAY(), and RANDBETWEEN(), but there’s no comparable function for generating random letters. The truth is, most of won’t need ...

One of the pieces of equipment for the quantum random number generator in the NIST Boulder laboratories. Very little in this life is truly random. A coin flip is influenced by the flipper’s force, its ...

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 ...

Less than a minute into my phone call with QuintessenceLabs’ CTO John Leiseboer, he goes silent. There’s a click, a bleep, and he’s back on the line. “We’ll assume it was a random event,” he jokes.

Using a single, chip-scale laser, scientists have managed to generate streams of completely random numbers at about 100 times the speed of the fastest random-numbers generator systems that are ...