Testimonials

Hey RANDOM.ORG,

For the last three years, my internet friends do a March Madness Bracket competition. Whoever correctly guesses the most amount of wins.

Being a Canadian, I know little about US College Sports, and Basketball just isn't my sport.

I said I was gonna pass and they said. ‘No one gets a bracket right, give it a try, you could guess.’

Then I though how Random! So, every year I use a combination of random questions about universities I have never even heard about (which university is closer to the continental US, Which University has a bigger endowment, which university has a bigger student population)

For universities I have heard of, I used the Random.org coin flipper to flip 29 coins and then the majority of heads or tails wins. I also look away and click the flip again for a random number of times.

My success has been very limited to say the least! But I do have fun and I enjoyed reading your history of Random.org.

I do have to count the heads or tails manually to make sure one has won. But if you wanted you could add a total of heads or tails.

Anyways thanks for being so random I couldn't make a March Madness bracket without you!

—Robert D., Vancouver

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