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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

ChatGPT may be an eloquent speaker, bullshit artist, and purveyor of misinformation — but a mathematician it is not. Yes, you may be familiar with accounts of people convincing ChatGPT that 2+2=5, but ...

Many popular random number generators (RNGs) are based on classical computer algorithms and have the advantage of being fast and easy to implement. The best examples pass many statistical tests ...

Prime numbers are sometimes called math’s “atoms” because they can be divided by only themselves and 1. For two millennia, mathematicians have wondered if the prime numbers are truly random, or if ...

Jeffrey Miecznikowski does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations ...

David Zuckerman receives or received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Simons Foundation, the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation, Microsoft Research, the Institute for Advanced ...