Testimonials

We run monthly contests on our site and I must say Random.org has been very helpful. We use it to choose our winners and it has been fair and just fine.

—Dorette, Abusaki's Corner, USA

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

I used your random number page to get truly random numbers between 0–99 in order to study the Monte Carlo method for arithmetic solution of problems and to simulate the beta decay of nuclei. Thanks a lot, it saved me the trouble of having to input into MS Excel, 500 numbers, which were pseudo-random, anyway.

—Yannis Thomopoulos, Department of Physics, University of Athens

I am in your debt for providing a service compatible with directions in advanced musical composition. I have used your service to generate systems of random digits integral to my compositional processes. It will not come as a surprise if other artists exploring extended musical forms and cross-media find your help valuable in their work.

—Michael Byron

I use Random.org to generate random numbers for a random sample of informants when I conduct surveys. It really beats using the dart board or hat.

—Rod Stubina, Department of Anthropology, University of Florida

I am using your random number generator to pull unique 6-digit odd integers between 100,000 and 999,999 as unique seed numbers for a random sample I will use to study the load shapes of our electric utility customers. We pull samples for each of our rate classifications. Thanks for making this available, and easy to use.

—Bob Smith, OG&E Electric Services, USA