True Random Number Service

List of Helpful Individuals

RANDOM.ORG is a true random number service that generates randomness via atmospheric noise. This page is a thanks to a lot of people without whom the service would not have been possible.

Trinity College, Dublin

A lot of people in Trinity College, Dublin deserve thanks for their help with RANDOM.ORG. In particular, I am grateful to the Distributed Systems Group (DSG) and the School of Computer Science and Statistics (SCSS) for letting me host the server here. René Meier and Jim Dowling from the Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) research project also deserve special thanks for donating a Dell Dimension 4550, which is the current RANDOM.ORG server. This machine has a Pentium 4 CPU clocked at 2.53 GHz and is equipped with 1 GB memory. Kris Mosurski from the Department of Statistics also deserve special thanks for many helpful conversations.

Former Students

A number of former students have helped with RANDOM.ORG and deserve a very special thanks. One of the great things about being in a university is that you get to work with such motivated and intelligent students.

Charmaine Kenny (2005) conducted the most detailed analysis of the RANDOM.ORG numbers so far.
Louise Foley (2001) conducted the first analysis of the RANDOM.ORG numbers.
Antonio Arauzo Azofra (2001) built a super-fancy statistics module based on Louise Foley's analysis.

You can download Charmaine's and Louise's reports from the analysis page.

Web Programming and Design

I am very grateful to a couple of generous guys who have donated code that is used on the web server.

Tim Shank has donated the new web design, which is not only very readable and pretty stylish, but also conforms to the XHTML and CSS standards.
Andronikos Nedos wrote the SOAP server; this is currently in the process of being updated.

The Open Source Community

RANDOM.ORG would not have been possible without the great software that so many people from the open source community have built. The following deserve a special mention for their great software.

Everyone behind the amazing GNU/Linux software base
The Debian team for putting together a great distribution
The Apache HTTP Server team for a fantastic web server
The people behind the GMP arbitrary precision arithmetic library
The author of the Cephes math library
The people behind Gnuplot, which I use to draw the graphs
The PHP people for making dynamic web content generation so easy

Code Contributions

Thanks to the following for donating code specifically to RANDOM.ORG:

Alex Fihman for the iGoogle Password String Generator

Help with Coin Pictures

Thanks to the following for help with pictures for the coin flipper:

Carl Cornealy for the pictures of the American Buffalo 24-Karat Gold Coin.
Michal Makowski for the pictures of the Polish coins.
Joshua Holman for the pictures of the Yugoslavian and Canadian coins as well as pictures of the following US coins: the Buffalo nickel, the penny, the dime, the half dollar, the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin and those of the dollar coins that feature past presidents.
Ste and Georgia for the pictures of the Chinese 150 Yuan coin commemorating the Year of the Dragon.
Kricke Sundin for the pictures of the Swedish 1 Krone.
Roberto Amorim for the pictures of the Brazilian 1 Real coin.
Ralphie Kabo for the pictures of the Australian dollar coin and to Hamish Mcpherson for doing them up in Photoshop.
The Norwegian National Bank for the Norwegian coins and to Trond Bjerkestrand for pointing me in their direction.
John Condon of the Voting Coin Company for letting me use the photos of the 2004 American voting coin. They hold the copyright to the photos. You can buy the real voting coin from them for about $7.
Todd Redden for the pictures of the decision maker coin that his father gave him in 1968. If this coin fascinates you, check out Luke Rhinehart's novel The Dice Man.
Gar Travis for the photos of the beautiful antique coins and the US nickel.
Dwight Manley for letting me use his photos of the 1913 Liberty Head nickel and to Donn Pearlman of the American Numismatic Association for telling me about it. Donn says this rare coin is worth about $3 million.
Angela Lorenz for the pictures of the Swiss 1 Franc coin and the Dutch Rijksdaaler.
René Meier for the pictures of the Swiss 2 Franc coin.
Leonidas Enrique de la Rosa for the pictures of the Colombian 500 pesos coin.
Tony Morse for the US coin pictures.
Karl Eklund for taking the pictures of the East Caribbean Dollar and to Alwi Wijaya for doing them up in Photoshop.
The Danish National Bank for making the pictures of the Danish Kroner available and to Martin R. Larsen for pointing me in their direction.
The European Central Bank for the Euro coin pictures.