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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Physical theories enable us to make predictions. We can ask ‘what would happen if …’ and reason about the answer, even in scenarios that would be virtually impossible to set up in reality 2. Each ...

Life is unpredictable, and random things happen to us all the time. You might say the universe itself is random. Yet somehow, large numbers of random events can generate large-scale patterns that ...