Since the dawn of written history, people have exploited the randomness of a roll of a die to inject their games with the thrill of the unpredictable. Today, randomness is finding myriad other uses, such as encrypting credit card numbers in Internet transactions, deciding how to allocate treatments in drug trials, choosing precincts to call in national polls, running online gambling sites, and helping physicists simulate phenomena ranging from the weather to traffic patterns.
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