Testimonials

I want to thank you very much for your random number generator! We teachers are supposed to check for understanding with all of our students. I am sure you are aware of all the stumbling blocks to actually calling on students randomly. I hope that your random number generator, with its ability to generate integers within the range that I specify, will help me to better sample my students for their understanding. More important to the students is the classroom jobs like setting up the technology each day, passing out folders, etc. (I teach 6th Grade in the USA.)

The most important feature of your generator is the ability to set the range/limits!

I tried popsicle sticks in a can but found that method to be ‘uncannily’ unfair! It seemed like I kept getting the same sticks!

I tried writing numbers on index cards, but I can't shuffle cards to save my life! (Besides, when I pick the cards without looking, you know there is bias in that as well … somewhere in my brain.)

I finally purchased some dice from the net that have various numbers of sides. But that didn't work either because the number of students in my class changes throughout the year as the students in our area have a somewhat high transiency rate.

I was at a loss, and the students have been getting upset with me.

In the past I have Googled for something like this, but I guess I never quite put in the correct words to arrive at your site, but I THANK GOD THAT I FOUND YOUR SITE TODAY! And, yes, you may use this testimonial!

—Shannon Clark, Los Angeles, USA

I discovered Random.org due to the New York Times article on random numbers today. I've already downloaded the three pre-packaged 10 MB files and wish there were more of them (at least three more 10 MB files). I'm using them as audio—interpreted as 16-bit WAV files, they form perfect white noise, which has many uses in acoustics and audio-equipment testing, which is my field. Used in pairs, they form perfect, uncorrelated stereo white noise.

I've been able to get more use out of the first three 10 MB files by reversing their byte order (the resulting white noise sounds the same) and by using various other audio-editing tricks like concatenating the files to produce long streams). I've also used 1, 2, 3 or 4 bytes at a time to produce different audio wordlengths. Thanks to the 2's complement number system, this latter scheme is particularly effective for audio since you always get equal distributions of data points above and below zero.

Your files produce better noise than some pseudo-random schemes I've tried, since the latter can produce an audibly detectable cyclic effects in the sound quality if the sequence length is too short. The ear is an extremely good detector of such patterns. A quick-and-dirty one-time-pad scheme would involve Xor-ing your random bytes with the lower bytes of each 16-bit word on a commercial audio CD to produce the random number table. The recipient would only need your file and another copy of the audio CD. To crack it you'd have to search through every data sample on every CD ever released!

—David Ranada, Technical Editor, Sound & Vision Magazine