A DRAM memory chip on a circuit board B Christopher/Alamy
Computers struggle to create randomness, but a new approach may finally enable them to generate a truly random number.
Such numbers are a vital ingredient for cryptographic algorithms and scientific simulations, but computers, which are built for churning through tasks with guaranteed repeatability, can’t be easily made unpredictable. The apparent randomness that they can create, known as pseudorandomness, is enough for some applications, but telltale patterns within the output make this inadequate in some cases.
True random number generators produce numbers by sampling…
