Ask a designer or artist if any aspect of their process is random. The answer will likely reveal a complex relationship between human cognition, digital media, authorship, and even conceptions of ...

Are you convinced that the shuffle mode on your iPod is messing with your mind? Or that certain numbers are bound to come up in the next lottery? If yes, you may be holding on to some serious ...

Understanding whether nature is deterministically predetermined or there are intrinsically random processes is a fundamental question that has attracted the interest of multiple thinkers, ranging from ...

Because of its importance, much scientific effort is devoted to understanding when a given process generates ‘good’ randomness. A process is represented by a device, or black box, producing bits (Fig.

When Charles Darwin declared that evolutionary variations occur by chance, many of his contemporaries were alarmed, worrying about the implications of chance for people’s belief in the God who ...

The modern computer age runs on random numbers. Patternless strings of digits are essential for the data encryption that promises privacy and security online. And since computers—fundamentally ...

Randomness would seem to make a mathematical statement harder to prove. In fact, it often does the opposite. Of all the tools available to the mathematician, randomness would seem to offer little ...

Avi Wigderson is the first recipient of both a Turing Award and an Abel Prize, math's top honor. Andrea Kane / Institute for Advanced Study The 2023 Turing Award—the computing world’s Nobel Prize ...

Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences revealed that not all forms of quantum nonlocality guarantee intrinsic randomness. They ...

Random chance mechanics in video games can be frustrating. Missing a 90% shot in XCOM, when you really need it to hit, can cause some players to throw their controller or rage quit. But not all ...