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 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