Testimonials

After years of relying on your site, a random impulse has finally led me to say thank you. We've been relying on the Integer Generator for years. It helps us select the winner of our space trivia contest, a weekly feature of the ‘What Up!’ segment of Planetary Radio. PlanRad is the public radio series I produce and host for the Planetary Society, based in Pasadena, California. It is aired by about 150 stations in North America and beyond, along with XM Satellite Radio. Our podcast pulls in thousands of additional listeners.

I can't say we promote Random.org every week, but when the site is mentioned it is always in admiration. We are grateful.

Best of luck in your business and other efforts.

—Mat Kaplan

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