Testimonials

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

Dear Mr. Random,

I used your random generator. I am an office specialist at a University department. It is my responsibility to enter and close out all the accounts on our department copier. The copier does not allow me to actually erase existing accounts. Since you need a 8-digit passcode to access your account and use the copier, I instead ‘close’ the account by changing the passcode on that account to something the previous user will not know.

This month I'll have to do around 200 such entries on the copier. I got sick of devising my own numbers, so I searched on the internet for a random number producer, and I found you. It was fun producing numbers. I definitely fulfilled my geek quota for the next year.

—Jason Miller, University of Minnesota