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 ...

Randomness is powerful. Think about a presidential poll: A random sample of just 400 people in the United States can accurately estimate Clinton’s and Trump’s support to within 5 percent (with 95 ...

Computers are known to be precise and — usually — repeatable. That’s why it is so hard to get something that seems random out of them. Yet random things are great for games, encryption, and multimedia ...

David Dias is a research engineer at Protocol Labs. He specializes in peer-to-peer networking and distributed systems. Electricity, water, gas – these are just some of the public utilities we use ...

These are not the kinds of objects that concern Scott Sheffield. Sheffield, a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studies shapes that are constructed by random ...