Testimonials

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

I write and use molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo simulators which have their own pseudo-random number generators (for portability and reproducibility). These require the user to input a random number seed. If I want to perform an ensemble of N statistically independent runs (e.g., with different initial conditions), I need N independent seeds. So I use your site to generate seeds to paste into my input script, i.e., your random generator generates random seeds for input to a pseudo-random generator. Say that 5 times fast.

—Steve Plimpton, Sandia National Labs