Testimonials

I am using your random number generator to set the value of a proposed currency called the Wall Street Dollar. This currency would be intended for transactions among parties who seek exposure to conflicts of interest in the financial industry, such as proprietary trading, investment rating, executive compensation and financial industry political contribution.

Pseudo-random numbers were out of the question, since they would be vulnerable to the kind of manipulation the new currency was invented to avoid. Only the highest quality random numbers could be used.

They could also be used to introduce minute random delays into the transaction processing of the proposed exchange for Wall Street Dollars to ensure fairness and to thwart high-frequency trading.

Your service is indispensable.

—Christian Marks

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