The method used to generate the digits, a pair of 555 timers sending pulses through linear-feedback shift registers, would at best be considered pseudo-random.

The team's quantum computing method is able to not only generate these incredibly long, highly random numbers, but can also generate them in a reasonable amount of time.

For that you’ll need a true random number generator (RNG), and this open-source hardware RNG uses one of the better methods we’ve seen.

But the random number generator they built was, they reasoned, still useful. So Haahr made it public at random.org, where it has been churning out random numbers ever since. It gets a lot of visitors.

Digital random number generation is more common today, with complex algorithms producing pseudo-random outcomes based on complex mathematical equations.