If your name gets picked for jury duty, it’s because a computer used a random number generator to select it. The same goes for tax audits or when you opt for a quick pick lottery ticket. But how can you trust that the draw was truly fair? A new cheat-proof protocol for generating random numbers could provide that confidence — preventing hidden tampering or rigged outcomes, researchers report June 11 in Nature.
“Having a public source of randomness that everyone trusts is important because the higher the stakes of an application or the more people involved, the more incentive there is to change or hack a random number generator,”