LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Pseudorandom Number Generator
built 810 days ago
[One] early random-number generator extracted randomness from a very retro source: lava lamps, whose illuminated blobs move unpredictably. In the lavarand project, created by Noll and colleagues in 1996, digital cameras trained on six lava lamps fed images into a computer, which converted the pictures into numbers (SN: 8/9/97, p. 92).
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"We focus mainly on efficient and recently proposed techniques for generating uniform pseudorandom numbers." "Here, 'uniform pseudorandom' means that the numbers behave from the outside as if they were the values of i.i.d. [individually independently distributed] random variables, uniformly distributed over some finite set of symbols. This set of symbols is often a set of integers of the form {0, ..., m - 1} and the symbols are usually transformed by some function into values between 0 and 1, to approximate the U(0,1) distribution."
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Other common uses of pseudorandom numbers include simulating probabilistic processes, and sampling large spaces of possibilities. The pseudorandom numbers that Mathematica generates for a range of numbers are always uniformly distributed over the range you specify.
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Pseudorandom Number Generator