I’m Adam Conway, an Irish technology fanatic with a BSc in Computer Science and I'm XDA’s Lead Technical Editor. My Bachelor’s thesis was conducted on the viability of benchmarking the non-functional ...

What is a random number? As the term suggests, a random number is a number chosen by chance -- i.e., randomly, from a set of numbers. All the numbers in a specified distribution have equal probability ...

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 ...

A new network paradigm can generate meaningfully random numbers—and fast. In network encryption, randomness has huge value because it’s not “solvable” by hackers. Classical computers can’t be ...

Most people treat Excel as a rigid calculator, completely missing its capacity for chaos. Excel's built-in randomization tools can generate numbers, shuffle existing lists, and build mock timelines in ...

Skyrmions, tiny magnetic anomalies that arise in two-dimensional materials, can be used to generate true random numbers useful in cryptography and probabilistic computing. Whether for use in ...

RANDOMNESS IS A valuable commodity. Computer models of complex systems ranging from the weather to the stockmarket are voracious consumers of random numbers. Cryptography, too, relies heavily on ...