Testimonials

I wanted to let you know that during this lockdown time my family has used your random card sorter to play long distance card games over Zoom. My parents (in their 80's located in Oregon) and their two daughters (Alaska and Arizona) are able to meet weekly and play a few hands of Hearts. Without your website it would not have been possible. My parents look forward to our weekly time and we will likely continue even past the virus protection time. I know there are online games that could work for the card purpose, but the ability to see each other's faces is more important than the cards. My parents are not tech savvy and would not be able to participate in anything online. So we have settled on this method of playing long distance cards.

Suggestion: If I had a wish however, I would wish that the output of the random cards were in rows of 13 (as if they were dealt to 4 people). It would make it so much easier to forward everyone's cards. :-)

Thank you!

—Jeanne Shaffer

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