If you’ve ever done a raffle or lottery at work, there’s a chance you will have used some kind of random number generator to choose a winner. These basic apps use a special algorithm to select a number at random, but at first glance that’s all they can do. Today we’re looking at a few of the many ways this simple software is actually fundamental to global industries.
Casinos
Going to any casino, whether it’s one on the high street or one you find online, hinges on knowing that the games you’re going to play there are entirely fair and down to chance. It should always come down to luck and luck alone. In person, that can be achieved thanks to physical things like the ball on a roulette wheel or the cards in a poker deck, but in digital versions, RNGs are critical.
Whether you’re loading up an online slot or looking to play European roulette remotely, the software behind online casino games invariably contains a hard-coded random generator. This means that every result, including where the final resting place of the ball lands on the roulette wheel, is guaranteed to be truly random. Not even the game creators can directly affect the results when the spins or draws start. It makes RNGs a fundamental building block of the industry.
Cybersecurity
Moving from casinos to an industry closely tied to them, RNGs also play a vital role in the modern cybersecurity world. Cybersecurity covers every element of keeping data safe online, whether that’s for casino deposits, bank transactions, or even the billions of emails sent out across the world every day. While security comes in many various forms, the most common is encryption.
Modern encryption software is built on the back of random number generators, using randomly generated codes to encrypt and disguise data in transit. In particular, they use the purest form of RNGs, ones hardwired directly into physical PC components, to ensure that the results can never be predicted at any stage. After all, once a code can be predicated, it can be cracked.
Simulation
There’s an old saying that no plan ever survives contact with the enemy, and this is true no matter if that enemy is the weather or just city traffic. Regardless of how carefully something is prepared for, real life will always have random elements that simply cannot be predicted, and in large-scale simulation projects, RNGs are used to add an appropriate amount of randomness to the model.
For example, if a city is trying to resolve traffic issues by re-routing and rearranging its streets, an RNG can add things to a traffic simulation like accidents that are both unpredictable and dramatic. In the same way, an environmental impact model could add in sudden weather changes or accidental oil spills that would completely upend many simulations. Given how widely these simulations are now used for many issues with global impacts, it is one of the largest RNG applications in the world.
Considering how many applications RNGs have today, the software has managed to remain very much in the background. It’s a perfect example of how something fundamentally simple can have massively wide-ranging uses.