Game of chance

Open-access content Thursday 25th June 2015 — updated 4.50pm, Tuesday 14th April 2020

We can get a random number by throwing some dice. We can get a random answer to a yes/no question by tossing a coin. But beyond these trivial things, randomness is serious business. When a lottery winner is picked you want to make sure that the number picked is truly random. As the mathematician Robert Coveyou once said: "Random number generation is too important to be left to chance."

Brian A Jones 15 June

This article appeared in our July 2015 issue of The Actuary .

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