Testimonials

I have never been a very decisive person especially when it came to the more important decisions in life. Just recently I was shopping an online retailer in hopes of finding a wolf shirt, and ran into a decision making dilemma. You see, I am a huge fan of wolf shirts for the obvious reason that they speak volumes about a person from a single glance, personality (lone wolf), social habits (enjoys the night life), special talents (casting/bow staff handling). Said shirts, however, have a variable number of wolves howling at the moon, and I was not about to commit the major fashion faux pas of donning the wrong number this late in my 30's.

My first thought was to graph the number of wolves vs my percieved irresistibility but that ended up with a 2-way tie between 4 and 5 wolves. Neither my mother (who has always said that I am fairly handsome) nor my WOW guild were able to provide a convincing argument one way or the other, but I lucked out, and stumbled across your website which guaranteed me unparalleled randomness for breaking these kinds of deadlocks.

With a click the decision was made and at that point I took a deep breath of musty basement and literally jumped for joy at the new prospects that lay ahead of me in my life rattling my cat elf-fire. To make a long story short your site enabled me to buy the optimal wolf shirt, and my social life has blossomed ever since.

—Jack Hughes

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