Sometimes you need random numbers — and properly random ones, at that. Hackaday Alum [Sean Boyce] whipped up a rig that serves up just that, tasty random bytes delivered fresh over MQTT. [Sean] tells ...

A team of international scientists has developed a laser that can generate 254 trillion random digits per second, more than a hundred times faster than computer-based random number generators (RNG).

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 ...

Randomness sits at the heart of everything we do online. Many encryption algorithms depend upon randomly generated numbers to work, and that’s just one example of many. But how random is random? It’s ...

Researchers have come up with a way to generate truly random numbers using quantum mechanics. The method uses photons to generate a string of random ones and zeros, and leans on the laws of physics to ...

Although these days we get to tap into many sources of entropy to give a pretty good illusion of randomness, home computers back in the 1980s weren’t so lucky. Despite this, their random number ...