Here’s a game Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, invented in 1948. He was trying to model the English language as a random process. Go to your bookshelf, pick up a random book, open it ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In the movie Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr challenges the physicist early in his career: Bohr: Algebra is like sheet music. The important ...

The title probably doesn't make a lot of sense, so let me lay out what I'm doing. I'm in the early stages of creating a framework for generating test data for a specific problem domain. One of the ...

People's ability to make random choices or mimic a random process, such as coming up with hypothetical results for a series of coin flips, peaks around age 25, according to a study. People's ability ...