Generating a string of random numbers is easy. The hard part is proving that they’re random. As Dilbert creator Scott Adams once pointed out, “that’s the problem with randomness: you can never be sure ...

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 ...

RANDOMNESS IS A valuable commodity. Computer models of complex systems ranging from the weather to the stockmarket are voracious consumers of random numbers. Cryptography, too, relies heavily on ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – If you wanted a random number, historically you could do worse than to pick a sequence from the string of digits in pi. But Purdue University scientists now say other sources ...

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, ...