ABSTRACT
People have been making random numbers in this way for millennia. Early Greeks and Romans played games of chance by tossing the heel bone of a sheep or other animal and seeing which of its four straight sides landed uppermost. Heel bones evolved into the familiar cube-shaped dice with pips that still provide random numbers for gaming and gambling today. World War II provided another example of imperfect randomness with real-world consequences. It came from the famous effort at Bletchley Park in England, where cryptographers and mathematicians such as Alan Turing worked to break the German military code. In 1955, the Rand Corporation published a million random digits from an electronic circuit that, like spins of a virtual roulette wheel, created supposedly unpredictable numbers. But these too displayed subtle patterns. Enrico Fermi saw that one approach to the problem was to guide an imaginary neutron along its path according to the odds that it would encounter a uranium nucleus.
