Testimonials

I have found the most fantastic use of your random number generator.

I use the first few lines of a 100 number sequence divided into five columns to predict future events in my life as far in the future as 6–8 months; for example, whether or not I should I should change careers (yes) or wait for a pay raise in my old job (no), whether or not I should change the engine belts in my car (no) or wait until September to do it (yes), whether or not I should ask my old girlfriend to marry me (no), whether or not I should ask the divorced lady who lives on my street to marry me (yes), if we should elope and get married in Las Vegas (yes), whether or not I should liquidate my 401(k) (yes) and invest in commodities options (accuracy = about 91%), whether or not I should refinance my house and accept fairly high refinancing fees (yes), and which religion is the correct faith (Catholicism scored the highest).

I'm looking at some really interestin numerological prophesies right now; for example, the Arizona Diamondbacks will win the pennant but lose in the World Series next October; unfortunately my mother and father are not going to leave me anything in their will when they pass on (they are going to live at least another ten years each anyway), and I am going to be reacquanited with a long lost friend in the next three weeks.

This is really great! Being able to predict the future using your random number generator has really helped me and my family make our most important decisions in life.

—David Hilton

I study the life-cycle of viruses, and I perform lots of tissue culture experiments. In order to try to develop theories to explain some results I was getting, I wrote a computer program that uses a Monte Carlo scheme to simulate infection of cells by viruses. I need a different random number for each simulated virus, in order to randomly assign it to a cell that it ‘infects.’ In order for the results to be meaningful, I need to simulate tens of thousands of ‘cells’ and hundreds of thousands of ‘viruses,’ so I need hundreds of thousands of random numbers. The pseudo-random numbers produced by the Apple Macintosh built-in linear congruental generator proved themselves to be not good enough for the job, as I found that some numbers were chosen too often, a definite no-no for my purposes. Then I saw the NY Times article about this site and gave it a try. First I tried using Random.org numbers to seed the Macintosh generator at frequent intervals during the execution of the simulation, but it did not solve the problem. So I tested using all numbers from this site and they passed my quality test. So now I download several batches at a time of 10,000 numbers between 1 and 40,000 and string them into big files as the sources of my numbers. I'd like to be able to download them in even bigger batches, though. Thanks for a truly useful service!

—David N. Levy, University of Alabama at Birmingham