Testimonials

I used Random.org to simulate noisy transistors in circuit simulations for a school project (and made sure to credit Random.org for the data in the report!)

—Pepin Torres, Revere, Massachusetts, USA

Hiya! Just a quick email to pass on my use for your website. I am making an Advent Calendar and wanted all the ornaments to be in a true random order. My partner showed your website and I now have a fantastically random order in my Calendar.

—Lisa, New Zealand

I use Random.org to generate numbers for questions I am going to ask the kids at school. I'm a maths teacher and often have trouble devising questions (especially for data handling!). It's great to be able to specify what kind of numbers I want, and how many. Thanks for taking a load of work off me!

—Tanya Prestwood

Thank you for the random number site. Our university, in a campaign of privacy protection, has forbidden us faculty to use any part of student social security numbers to post grades, nor may we use any part of the randomly assigned new student ID numbers that replaced the social security numbers. Using your very friendly site, I was able to generate all the 4-digit numbers I'll ever need to assign to students for grade-posting purposes.

—Susan Toby Evans, Department of Anthropology, Penn State University

I use your site, Random.org, on a regular basis for my modern dance choreography. I apply the randomly generated numbers to assigned variable constraints, such as time, space and movement order.

Please visit: www.chengdance.org, and www.dailydance.org.

With appreciation for your source of quality random numbers,

—Anita Cheng

I just wanted to drop you a quick note on how I have been using your Random.org random number generator. I program automated lighting for concerts, and very often want to select random groups of fixtures, set colors to random values, or randomize strobes. Although some control consoles have a random feature built in, I would much rather have a predictable, random set that I know is truly random, yet predictable for each show. Thanks for helping me keep my shows nice and randomly flashy!

—Chris Wessels

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

We appreciate the help your technology has provided to our card shuffling process. Thanks again for the use of your work—we appreciate that!

—Ann ‘Abigail’ Aynes, Case's Ladder, USA

Just thought I would let you know that I use Random.org to generate Lotto numbers for my Clan (Drake Knights) on Mech Crusaders. It's perfect for a small lotto situation, great site, thanks.

—Cody Jones

Dear Mr. Haahr, I would like to express my appreciation for your random number generator. I used it for selecting a sample of 40 (of about 400) for my Work-Study project, a way to provide students on government assistance with money and work experience, at the Department of Classics, University of Toronto, Erindale Campus. My supervisors, Dr. Catherine Rubincame and Elaine Goettler would also like to express their thanks. I hope you keep up the good work.

—Ilija Milicevic, University of Toronto

Mr. Wizard is a monthly contest based on a pretty neat on-line card trick. A $50 cash prize is awarded each month to both the winner and person who referred the winner to our site. The winner is chosen by first sequentially numbering each entry as it arrives then using the web interface at Random.org to select one of the numbers.

—Fred Glendening

I produce a high school quiz show in Dayton, Ohio (USA). Each year we can only choose 36 high schools, & we typically get about 70 schools who wish to play. I assign a number to each school, then use Random.org to generate the field of teams that will compete. It's a completely fair way to choose the schools.

—Tom Housley, Producer and Director, WHIO TV, USA

I use the random number generator to pick winners in the various raffles I hold on The Saab Network web site. It's a group of Saab owners (250,000 visitors each month) that originally began on the Internet as a mailing list in 1988!

—Scott Paterson

As Ethics and Compliance Officer for a University research and health care clinic, I use your random number generator to select records for review or audit. The US Office of Inspector General suggests standards for compliance programs. Compliance programs are to assure companies and institutions are complying with various regulations in healthcare, particularly with regard to submission of claims for treatment payment and the expenditure of federal funds for research. Standard of care plus various other regulatory and certification agencies also require reviews and audits of the healthcare and research (both clinical and basic science) process. Using random numbers, we select a percentage of things such as patient visits, physicians, billing records, grants, researchers, etc. for review or audit.

Thank you for this valuable service.

—Stanton Royce, Cancer Research and Treatment Center, University of New Mexico

I've been using your Random.org website to help create experiments for the last year and a half (by making sure trial orders are random) and would just like to say thank you for making it available. I was working in cognitive psychology as an undergrad and am now working in ophthamology at Johns Hopkins as a research assistant. Needless to say, both fields use numerous trials in experiments and the ability to quickly get ten to twenty lists of random sequences has made it very easy to gain more control in the research I'm working on.

—Francesca Fortenbaugh, Johns Hopkins University

I am using the random sequence generator to take a 15% sample of the archaeological potsherds I am studying. More specifically, I am studying the ceramic vessels and fragments collected, over the course of eight years, from an early Spanish colonial town in Central America. The town was occupied for only a generation, so there was minimal change through time in ceramic style. For each excavation unit and level, I analyze all potsherds that include handles, rims, painted decoration, unusual clay characteristics, and the like. These are my diagnostic sherds. The remainder do not provide enough information to make analyzing and recording each one individually worthwhile, but I don't want to neglect them entirely, as in certain contexts they make up a high percentage of what we have. So, I use your random sequence generator to help me select 15% of this non-diagnostic remainder for study. Thank you for the help.

—Jeb J. Card, Department of Anthropology, Tulane University

Dear Mads, This is an expression of thanks for making your random number generator available. We use it to randomly draw winners in sweepstakes to promote Australian wine in Denmark! These sweepstakes will usually attract thousands of participants and we have found the generator, in addition to being extremely simple and quick to use, is a good reference if participants wish to know the method with which we draw winners.

—Thomas Andersen, Australian Trade Commission

I am using your program to generate six random numbers between 6 and 9 to consult the I-Ching, the ancient Chinese book of Changes. The traditional method is to use yarrow stalks in a somewhat complicated procedure. More recently people have been using coins. It would be great if you could add a three-coin toss to your menu so that the I-Ching values could be determined. It would also be great if you could simulate the look of old Chinese coins. Just a suggestion, but thank you very much in any case.

—Michael Keating

I'm using Random.org to generate new discreet keys for each home or business rekeys, ensuring that no two customers will ever receive the same key bitting. I'm using the randomized sequence generator. For a 6 six pin lock, I enter the first two digits and let the generator pick the rest, i.e., 14XXXX.

There is a Maximum Adjacent Cut Specification (MACS) that varies from manufacturer to manufacturer. For instance, with a Schlage brand lock the maximum useable difference between two adjacent cuts on a key is 7 depths. This means throwing out many numbers generated randomly, but they're very easy to spot on a printed page. I begin using first two pins of 00 and progress them to 99. Even considering the toss outs, that will provide me with more key bittings than I will ever need.

I've only just begun using this, as I've just discovered your site, but it seems to work really well.

—Mike Bardsley CML

USS Constitution, known better as ‘Old Ironsides,’ is the oldest commissioned warship afloat in the entire world.

We use your program to choose winners for our July 4th lottery. We get thousands of entries from across the world each year and only choose 150 winners. Winners receive an invitation to be onboard the ship during our Turnaround Cruise in Boston Harbor.

Thank you for a great program.

—LT William Marks, Executive Officer of the USS Constitution

We used it to generate the winner of 105,000 frequent flyer miles in a draw for an on-line survey conducted for a major international airline. That will get someone from Europe to Asia in Economy or Business Class to the Middle East/North Africa. Someone is pretty happy now! We normally do it internally on our own computer generator but the person who does that is on compassionate leave. So thanks for the use of your Random.org. I'll make sure I credit you to our client..... Best regards from sunny Sydney

—Carolyn Childs, Managing Director, Travel Research Centre, Sydney, Australia

In order to avoid creating a lot of words which all sounded the same, I generated some random numbers from your site and formatted them into 6 columns. From these I used a mapping algorithm I developed to convert the numbers in each row into letters. From that I could apply the phonological rules of my constructed language, and create a wide variety of words that I would not have come up with otherwise. Bonno! (‘Thanks’)

—James Worlton

Greeting Mads, I'd like to thank you for having shared your random sequencer with the world and with me today! I am part of a statewide committee that is organizing the Secondary Literacy Summit IV, California's only conference for teachers and school principals dealing with literacy issues for middle schools and high schools. Finding your random sequencer was great today, and it will come in handy to create a raffle for our 410 participants. Visiting your website, I really enjoyed reading about your Smart Couch and wish you and your team luck in finding needed uses for this very unique concept.

—Teresa Maldonado, Secondary Literacy Support Network, WestEd, Sacramento, California, USA

When giving a quiz or test, I like to allow the students to choose 6 out of 7 (for example) of the questions I ask, so that they can have one ‘free’ one if they don't know it. Invariably, some students answer all 7. Your website makes it so much easier to deal with this problem (and now the students know I use your site and that I won't just let a wrong answer stand for the one they should have omitted).

—David Webb, University of Mississippi

I wanted to knit a sweater and use yarn that I already had. In no single color was there enough yarn to finish the sweater. But I did have a type of yarn in equal amounts of 6 different colors, which when combined would be enough for the sweater. Blended together the colors looked great but I wanted the look to be random. Using numbers 1 through 6, your random number generator gave me a beautiful sequence for the colors. I also wanted the number of rows done in any one color to vary randomly from 1 to 3. A second list tells me how many rows to knit before changing colors.

—Barb Gates

Just want to thank you for making this available. It is very helpful to me for making up a new combination of players for our weekly indoor tennis game.

—Ron Williams, Ottawa, Canada

My name is Patrick Ayers, a Junior in high school in Florida.

I am doing a research project on voting theory, and I used numbers from Random.org to order candidates on the ballots as well as assign which group of voter would use which system of elections.

—Patrick Ayers