Testimonials

My group at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is required by law to conduct audits of randomly selected facilities. I utilize Random.org for the selection process; the format of the query page is well suited to our needs. Until I found (stumbled upon via Google) your website, the recommended procedure for ‘random selection’ was to go down the list of items selecting every nth one; actually these items are industrial or municipal facilities which store/use more than a minimum quantity of a chemical from a list of 140 chemicals selected for their toxic/flammable and dispersable properties. I found this methodology a statistical embarrassment; Random.org made it acceptable, and defensible, such as when a facility responds ‘why me?’

—Alfred J. Baginski, Chemical Accident Prevention Program, Environmental Protection Agency

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