Testimonials

In several things that I do, I require some form of randomness (for example, secure primary keys for databases, with almost no chance of collision error). To do this, I use your site to create them. A simple generation of numbers between 0 and 35, and then change them into their base-36 equivalent, however long the sequence needs to be, and you have an virtually unguessable primary key sequence. You can’t guess what the next key in the sequence will be. Very useful for keeping people from being able to hack your customer list and finding out who does business with you (they might be able to guess one, but the next won’t be sequential, so they would have to start all over again to find the next). I also use it in my writing, to generate datasets for locations and people by assigning integers to various items and using the site to pick the ones that apply.

—John Anderson

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