Testimonials

Hey RANDOM.ORG,

For the last three years, my internet friends do a March Madness Bracket competition. Whoever correctly guesses the most amount of wins.

Being a Canadian, I know little about US College Sports, and Basketball just isn't my sport.

I said I was gonna pass and they said. ‘No one gets a bracket right, give it a try, you could guess.’

Then I though how Random! So, every year I use a combination of random questions about universities I have never even heard about (which university is closer to the continental US, Which University has a bigger endowment, which university has a bigger student population)

For universities I have heard of, I used the Random.org coin flipper to flip 29 coins and then the majority of heads or tails wins. I also look away and click the flip again for a random number of times.

My success has been very limited to say the least! But I do have fun and I enjoyed reading your history of Random.org.

I do have to count the heads or tails manually to make sure one has won. But if you wanted you could add a total of heads or tails.

Anyways thanks for being so random I couldn't make a March Madness bracket without you!

—Robert D., Vancouver

Your project is wonderful; thank you for making it free and flexible for public use. I use it every day in my 7th grade classroom to assign warm-up problems to students in my class; this particular crop of kids is highly competitive and I was having trouble selecting from a group with all their hands up!

I read your FAQ and I wanted to contribute a little thought: to a computer, would it think it has free will? We store and process information in the same way; so we are running a big program which makes decisions based upon lots and lots of current states and simultaneous inputs. I suspect it is impossible to know whether we have free will from within ourselves and will have to use lots of expensive computer modeling to answer the question, but I'm guessing the answer is no.

—Dan Fruzzetti