Testimonials

I just found your website and am using it to randomize a group of numbers that define a group of video images to be used in subjective tests to determine the amount of compression through different transmission paths and through multiple compression stages for storage and processing. Thanks very much for this unique and useful service.

—Ed Williams, Senior Engineer, Public Broadcasting Service, USA

I needed to obtain several runs of true (genuine) random numbers so that I could set up a three-tier system of 60 randomly assigned sample plots for a vegetation control study. Your informative and useful site saved me some time, thanks again.

—Jason Hall, Department of Wildlife Ecology & Conservation, University of Florida

I run a local nightlife site called Norwich Tonight. We give away free cinema tickets every month and use Random.org to choose the winners.

—Carl Warrent, Norwich Tonight, UK

Channel 4 Interactive uses Random.org to generate winners of the regular competitions we run on the site. As there can be anything up to 15,000 entries, it helps to have something genuinely random, so we don't get accused of bias.

—Steve Berry, Entertainment Producer, Channel Four Television, UK

I am an archaeologist, looking into settlement and subsistence patterns in the Northern Great Basin of the western United States. The project involves sampling an area (a survey universe), which has been divided into three ecozones, and then further subdivided into 200×200 meter quadrats. Each quadrat is given a number according to what ecozone it falls in. The numbers are then chosen randomly (this is where you came in) and that quadrat is surveyed for archaeology. The old-fashioned method of choosing numbers was by the toss of the dice. Your website makes it extremely easy for me to draw the amount of random numbers I need in advance, which essentially makes planning field work easier. Well thanks again!

—Cheryl Foster-Curley, US Bureau of Land Management

I am using Random.org to choose a winner from the subscribers to my newsletter. Every month I choose a winner of 500 FREE Magnetic Business Cards.

Thank you.

—Nathan Cain, Web Magnets, USA

Your random number generator is great. I needed exactly this sort of service, to generate random numbers for a stratified, random sampling strategy for an archaeological survey, here in California, USA.

—Mike Avina, Jones & Stokes Associates, USA

Thank you for your website. We run a youth ministry program that has about 110 teens involved. During the month of March we decided to do a calendar, with prizes for each day, as a fundraiser. We sold 600 calendars. Instead of the traditional pulling numbers from a hat we decided to use your website to draw the daily winners. It is working out wonderfully. In a letter that we sent out with each calendar we mentioned your website and included a link. Thanks again for providing this service and may God Bless You.

—Dave Spada, Bridgewater Catholic Youth Ministry

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