Testimonials

I'm an aspiring Dungeon Master (the guy behind the screen Toto warns you about) and I use Random.org for everything, nearly. Character stats, I simulate 6 sets of 3 six sided dice for a quick and dirty ‘customized’ character. If I need a map quickly, I use the Dungeon's Masters Guide dice tables and simulate about 100 dice rolls for dungeon layout, decoration, and monster placement. Random encounters, check. In fact I could use Random.org for all my needs, as the entire D&D game is based on the random rolls of 6, 8, 10, 20, or 100 sided dice. But where's the fun in that? I'm planning to move my computer (one of them) to my den so I can run rolls quicker than normal, but I think I'll keep my big bag o' dice at my side just to keep my players on their toes. Thanks for the great service!

—Brian Rouse

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