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 ...

The technology behind modern casino slots has seen some impressive transformations in recent years. If you''ve played slots ...

Do you feel nervous when you make a credit-card transaction using your mobile phone? Your worries could soon be a thing of the past, thanks to a low-cost device that could bring powerful cryptography ...

Peter Bierhorst’s machine is no pinnacle of design. Nestled in the Rocky Mountains inside a facility for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the photon-generating behemoth spans an ...

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 ...

Quantum spin systems occupy a central role in understanding magnetic phenomena and phase transitions at the microscopic level. In these systems, intrinsic angular momentum (spin) interactions give ...

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 ...

Random number sequences are essential to a host of encryption schemes. But true randomness in the strict sense is not possible in the classical world; it only occurs in quantum-mechanical processes.