Testimonials

For the experiment I'm conducting for my MA thesis (linguistics) I needed to create a randomised list. The experiment contains 36 times an order of three pictures, of which the participant needs to select one as correct. The order of these three pictures had to be one of the 6 possibilities for each of the 36 items (ABC, ACB etc), and I had to make three different versions. Fortunately for me I found the list randomiser on your website Random.org. I gave each possibility a number, entered all six numbers six times and clicked randomise. Within a few seconds, I had three different versions of sequences! This saved me quite some time!

I will of course refer to the randomiser correctly in MLA style in my thesis.

Thank you for providing this free opportunity online.

—Ingrid Souillé

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