Testimonials

I am a high school English teacher and use Random.org in class on a weekly, sometimes daily basis. The ability to use the Sequence Generator to generate columns of random numbers is perfect for generating randomised seating plans or groups for project work. The Sequence Generator is also invaluable for creating a single list of 'turn order' for public speaking assignments or when conducting one-to-one interviews. As Random.org is able to generate the complete set of numbers instantly, this means that the students can observe the fairness of the process without it occupying valuable class time.

—James Ashton

The Dr. said I need to take my blood sugar randomly twice a day. Thanks for the random time generator!! Really keeps me random and from cheating.

—James Uzzell

Me and my brother use a fixed random.org URL in order to instantly generate anonymous nicknames (20 chars, [A-Za-z0-9]) every time we log in on the game server, to hide the fact that we've each put in 1000+ hours into the game. Works like a charm!

—Andy and Bob

Dear Random.org,

It's interesting how many times I want to choose something at random. It's nice to have a source to do just that. I've been using your generator to choose a random drawing exercise from my drawing prompt book. Sometimes my creativity needs a little priming. Thank you for this wonderful resource.

Sincerely,

—Shawna, California, USA

We used random.org for the new year raffle aiming to increase awareness for our crypto project, deepmaze.finance. We successfully integrated blockchain transactions to entrants and thanks to random.org's intuitive but traditional frontend, we delivered a very clear fairness message. Usually it takes more than a promise to convince entrants however, with random.org – blockchain integration, all stakeholders had a very pleasant experience. Thanks.

—Nick Badger

In several things that I do, I require some form of randomness (for example, secure primary keys for databases, with almost no chance of collision error). To do this, I use your site to create them. A simple generation of numbers between 0 and 35, and then change them into their base-36 equivalent, however long the sequence needs to be, and you have an virtually unguessable primary key sequence. You can’t guess what the next key in the sequence will be. Very useful for keeping people from being able to hack your customer list and finding out who does business with you (they might be able to guess one, but the next won’t be sequential, so they would have to start all over again to find the next). I also use it in my writing, to generate datasets for locations and people by assigning integers to various items and using the site to pick the ones that apply.

—John Anderson

I find myself turning to the random.org android app most frequently to adjudicate arguments between my son and daughters over whose turn it is to do what and in what order.

Created a list with their three names, and whenever I hear ‘BUT IT'S MY TURN TO…’ [pick first / sit by the window in the car/ play with the toy du jour / etc.], I reach for my phone, randomize the list, and whoever's name comes on top gets preference. They've even come to me to ask me to randomize the list for them, before an argument really gets going.

—Jeffrey Harper

I wanted to let you know that during this lockdown time my family has used your random card sorter to play long distance card games over Zoom. My parents (in their 80's located in Oregon) and their two daughters (Alaska and Arizona) are able to meet weekly and play a few hands of Hearts. Without your website it would not have been possible. My parents look forward to our weekly time and we will likely continue even past the virus protection time. I know there are online games that could work for the card purpose, but the ability to see each other's faces is more important than the cards. My parents are not tech savvy and would not be able to participate in anything online. So we have settled on this method of playing long distance cards.

Suggestion: If I had a wish however, I would wish that the output of the random cards were in rows of 13 (as if they were dealt to 4 people). It would make it so much easier to forward everyone's cards. :-)

Thank you!

—Jeanne Shaffer

Sometimes I find myself creating long lists of characters (not completely original, but based off of a certain video game), but I'm not actually creative enough to come up with attributes for them. Random.org has proven itself useful in many things – I use the website for generating birthdays, names, etc. From there, I can then easily imagine the more complicated things such as their personality, background, and appearance; things that would be much harder to do if I didn't have that initial platform to base them on.

I've also found many other uses for this website regarding generating random numbers and letters (such as for creating passwords or just making decisions). Thank you for this service.

—Katherine L.

We found Random.org when we were searching for a way to gather unbiased review data when publishing our articles. We use the service all the time to sample reviews and reviewers in order to gather genuine feedback about the products before we write about them on our website. Thanks for the great service!

—Gerald Schmidt, MusicAuthority

We’ve known about Random.org for years, and need to thank you for creating an incredible set of resources. We’ve heard great reviews from math professors, and now we understand why. The ability to quickly randomize any set of choices and generate a new list has come in handy for everything from making office life more engaging, to building new sequences for unordered tasks. Thank you again for all you do.

—The team at Metapress

To make better progress with learning spoken numbers in French—the goal is to get instant recognition plus fluidity in speech—I used Random.org to create a nice list of numbers which is long enough for me to use over and over again without fear of memory effects. I then imported them into a Google sheet, added a column of periods to help pause when spoken, then had an Android all read them out. The app, I realised later had a record function, so now I have an 6MB Ogg file of 2,000 random integers spoken in French with 1 second pauses between each!

At the root of it is your service. Thanks!

—Kiat Huang

Here is a video I made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RURjQe0BAFQ

The video is a slow, soft-spoken reading of random numbers, courtesy of Random.org's integer generator. I was pleased to receive the following comment in response, from fellow YouTube creator ChillWhispers: “This is very relaxing. I enjoy the random order of the numbers, that way I don't ‘expect’ it to end. Your voice is very soothing.”

That was pretty much the effect I was hoping to achieve.

Thank you again for clarifying Random.org's terms and conditions for me. I was thrilled to be able to make this video.

Thanks for being awesome,

—Vex Verity

We found Random.org through audiophile channels but have found so many other uses. We've turned hedge fund managers on to some of the tools. We've sent our staff acoustician the ‘white noise’ files which he seemingly uses. On a more simplistic level, we are using the random number generator to settle small bets in the office.

—Jerry Del Colliano, Home Theater Review

Just a quick word of compliment. I Looove your site! I use your site to generate random values to use in software test cases.

I generate Date of Birth for test case subjects, but I would like more on Gender and Ethnicity generation. For Gender, I tend to get integers and translate even numbers to Female and uneven to Male.

Again, Kudos!

—Constant Van Wyk, ProCare Health, New Zealand

Your project is wonderful; thank you for making it free and flexible for public use. I use it every day in my 7th grade classroom to assign warm-up problems to students in my class; this particular crop of kids is highly competitive and I was having trouble selecting from a group with all their hands up!

I read your FAQ and I wanted to contribute a little thought: to a computer, would it think it has free will? We store and process information in the same way; so we are running a big program which makes decisions based upon lots and lots of current states and simultaneous inputs. I suspect it is impossible to know whether we have free will from within ourselves and will have to use lots of expensive computer modeling to answer the question, but I'm guessing the answer is no.

—Dan Fruzzetti

It was a pleasure using your extremely quick and efficient random number generator service.

I'm currently using it to assign authentication codes to the users of my PBX system, so I know who's authorized to make international calls, etc. I was facing the problem that if I started assigning authentication codes in serial order, people might guess others' authentication codes and misuse them.

I wish to thank you for putting up this free service for the use of one-shot users like me, I really appreciate it.

—Arvind Ranganath, Hong Kong

It's common knowledge that a background of white noise tends to obscure other noise from outside the house and bedroom that can interfere with sleep.

I had never tried it, but decided to give it a go with a few dozen audio files borrowed from your site. I filled up a 700 megabyte CD with white noise, tweaked it to emphasize the lower frequencies, and had it set to repeat. The results were much more satisfactory than the next best audio background I had: a recording of ocean surf. Thank you for giving me a better day's sleep! (I work at night.)

—Reg Reid, USA

Below are 3 fractal landscapes I created with the help of these numbers. The first 2 used Bryce 6.3 and pictures from webshots.com which are then converted into fractal islands. The rest determines trees, grass, objects, sky, sea and textures.

The last one used Vista Pro where you can use the numbers as fractal seeds and alterations to what you choose to put in the landscape.

Images: Fedaweha.jpg (51 KiB), Fifihi.jpg (65 KiB), VP cinco de mayo A.jpg (70 KiB)

—Fuller Thompson

I am using your random number generator to set the value of a proposed currency called the Wall Street Dollar. This currency would be intended for transactions among parties who seek exposure to conflicts of interest in the financial industry, such as proprietary trading, investment rating, executive compensation and financial industry political contribution.

Pseudo-random numbers were out of the question, since they would be vulnerable to the kind of manipulation the new currency was invented to avoid. Only the highest quality random numbers could be used.

They could also be used to introduce minute random delays into the transaction processing of the proposed exchange for Wall Street Dollars to ensure fairness and to thwart high-frequency trading.

Your service is indispensable.

—Christian Marks

We've used your Random Number Generator on many occasions to perform various chance operations used for the purpose of assembling our recordings of John Cage's Number Pieces.

—Glenn Freeman, OgreOgress Productions, USA

Hi, I just wanted to tell you thank you for the die roller on your site. I am a 5th grade math teacher. I developed a lesson on comparing decimals around a game, but I forgot to bring the dice to school. Your website saved my lesson! I was able to project the die roller on my Smartboard and we were able to play as a whole class. Thanks!

—Stephanie J. Thomas

Just a quick note to say thanks for providing the service. I use a lot of things on the internet that almost do what you want, but Random.org saved me lots of time and gave me just what I wanted. I used it to generate lengths for some fibre optic lighting I'm having installed, just went through after and modified any adjacent numbers the same and it gave me exactly what I wanted. Easy to set the limits and size and shape of number results—great.

—Tim Glover

I just wanted to say thanks for the free services rendered from Random.org. I learned a lot from the site, including how truly inferior computer generated pseudo-randomness is. After learning all about random numbers, I updated my musical note generation program to use Random.org, instead of the Rnd() function in Visual Studio. Basically, I use the program when I am stuck in songwriting to help inspire/write parts of songs, and I feel that much more confident knowing that the notes are, in fact, truly random.

—Jesse Wolfe

I have never been a very decisive person especially when it came to the more important decisions in life. Just recently I was shopping an online retailer in hopes of finding a wolf shirt, and ran into a decision making dilemma. You see, I am a huge fan of wolf shirts for the obvious reason that they speak volumes about a person from a single glance, personality (lone wolf), social habits (enjoys the night life), special talents (casting/bow staff handling). Said shirts, however, have a variable number of wolves howling at the moon, and I was not about to commit the major fashion faux pas of donning the wrong number this late in my 30's.

My first thought was to graph the number of wolves vs my percieved irresistibility but that ended up with a 2-way tie between 4 and 5 wolves. Neither my mother (who has always said that I am fairly handsome) nor my WOW guild were able to provide a convincing argument one way or the other, but I lucked out, and stumbled across your website which guaranteed me unparalleled randomness for breaking these kinds of deadlocks.

With a click the decision was made and at that point I took a deep breath of musty basement and literally jumped for joy at the new prospects that lay ahead of me in my life rattling my cat elf-fire. To make a long story short your site enabled me to buy the optimal wolf shirt, and my social life has blossomed ever since.

—Jack Hughes

I am using the List Randomizer to randomize lists of music chords so as to improve my skill at sight-reading music by practicing moving quickly from one chord to another on my musical instrument (upright bass) without either mind memory or ‘finger memory’ interfering by allowing me to increasingly do the exercise without actually having to read the chords. (I have found this to be a major fault with books supposedly designed to improve sight-reading.)

While I am sure that for this rather pedestrian purpose, a PRNG would serve as well as a TRNG, yours was the first List Randomizer I found after long web sessions of searching, and it's perfect for what I need. The nondeterministic feature of your TRNG—while perhaps overkill for my purpose—is definitely appealing.

—Jack Clark, Idyllwild, California, USA

I'm tracking down high school classmates so we can notify them about our 35th reunion using internet searches. A fellow classmate created a spreadsheet with the 237 ‘missing’ classmates. After working on it for about a week, I realized I was just looking for people I knew and ignoring the rest. In order to do a fairer job searching for classmates, I decided to use your random number generator. Whatever number it generates, that's the row I do next in the spreadsheet. It also actually makes the process more fun, because I never know who I'll be looking for next.

Thanks for having this on the internet!

—Laura Chabrow, New Jersey, USA

Many thanks for your interesting and useful site. The various interfaces are nice and clean, direct to the point. I recently used the list randomizer and integer generator (over the secure connection, of course) to create a truly random password. Once I had it memorized and had to dispose of the slip it was written on, I went through a fairly rigorous obfuscation process to obscure the data on the paper, then cut it up into pieces, and used your random value generators to decide which pieces were going to go into which garbage cans.

—Brian Mearns

What can I say? Random.org is one of the most useful websites I've used in a long time. The website I run uses this service on a regular basis using it to select the winners of competitions and it's proved to be a very useful tool in doing so. Random.org is undoubtedly one of the unsung heroes of the internet. Thank you very much!

—Dan Hart, FunOrb World

I recently ran a contest, and I quickly realized I would need an easy way to randomly pick a winner, something more random than closing my eyes and picking off of a screen.

Upon some searching, I found the Random Integer Generator. With the program's help, I was able to input the amount of entries, and simply have it pick one for me … no work involved, and no chance of the results being ‘un-shuffled.’ It worked like a charm, and I had a winner picked in less than a minute!

Needless to say, I will be using the Integer Generator for all of my future giveaway contests, as it's the single best resource I've found for this task. Thanks so much for making it freely available, and I will always link back to it (for anyone else who may be in the same situation) when I run contests!

—Matthew Watts, Uncovered Films Blog

I want to thank you very much for your random number generator! We teachers are supposed to check for understanding with all of our students. I am sure you are aware of all the stumbling blocks to actually calling on students randomly. I hope that your random number generator, with its ability to generate integers within the range that I specify, will help me to better sample my students for their understanding. More important to the students is the classroom jobs like setting up the technology each day, passing out folders, etc. (I teach 6th Grade in the USA.)

The most important feature of your generator is the ability to set the range/limits!

I tried popsicle sticks in a can but found that method to be ‘uncannily’ unfair! It seemed like I kept getting the same sticks!

I tried writing numbers on index cards, but I can't shuffle cards to save my life! (Besides, when I pick the cards without looking, you know there is bias in that as well … somewhere in my brain.)

I finally purchased some dice from the net that have various numbers of sides. But that didn't work either because the number of students in my class changes throughout the year as the students in our area have a somewhat high transiency rate.

I was at a loss, and the students have been getting upset with me.

In the past I have Googled for something like this, but I guess I never quite put in the correct words to arrive at your site, but I THANK GOD THAT I FOUND YOUR SITE TODAY! And, yes, you may use this testimonial!

—Shannon Clark, Los Angeles, USA

After years of relying on your site, a random impulse has finally led me to say thank you. We've been relying on the Integer Generator for years. It helps us select the winner of our space trivia contest, a weekly feature of the ‘What Up!’ segment of Planetary Radio. PlanRad is the public radio series I produce and host for the Planetary Society, based in Pasadena, California. It is aired by about 150 stations in North America and beyond, along with XM Satellite Radio. Our podcast pulls in thousands of additional listeners.

I can't say we promote Random.org every week, but when the site is mentioned it is always in admiration. We are grateful.

Best of luck in your business and other efforts.

—Mat Kaplan

Thank you for this valuable service. We hold prize and community event drawings for our employees and the convenience of your site is fantastic (and fair).

—Mike McGuire, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Montana, USA

I play the Fantasy 5 which is part of the Florida lottery and I figured out that if I play 35 of the 36 numbers in 7 games without repeating that my odds of winning are 1:19518 instead of 1:376992. The only problem was that I need to play those numbers randomly in each game. Your random number generator has been helping ever since I've found it. Thank you very much!

—Cedrick Catalan

Thank you very much for your random number generator! I use it all the time. I have a monthly drawing on my site, so I use it to pick the two winners.

So, thank you! I see you are visiting Georgia. Have a great time!

—Suzanne Lanoue, TV MegaSite, USA

Thanks for your random website! I'm an artist who has been fascinated with the dynamic tensions in art and life: intellect/emotion, reason/intuition, order/chaos, planned/accidental, judgment/grace, etc. I've used your website in making my paintings. I use only red, yellow and blue, and the spattered paint lands according to your random sequences. The viewer's eye mixes the colors. Thanks!

—David Nelson

I meant to email you a long time ago, but kept putting it off until the work was published. Anyway, I used Random.org data initially for my final year project in 2003/2004. It was research on sorting algorithms in the presence of caches and branch predictors. Back then the data was available for download in 10MB blocks, and there were 16 of them. So I uses all of them, 'cat'ed together, as the data to be sorted.

I extended this into a Tech Report in 2005, and a paper in 2006, which got published in the ACM Journal of Experimental Algorithmics (eventually, in June).

Having truly random data made me certain my results weren't due to my errors, and having so much of it made my sure it wasn't an anomaly. That was especially useful as a mere undergrad, when I wasn't really sure what I was doing.

Thanks a lot for Random.org, and for the data.

—Paul Biggar, Trinity College Dublin

Thank you for Random.org. I use it for several of the reasons other people mention. My favorite use, however, is deciding where my work colleagues and I will go to lunch every Thursday. We tried voting, but we were unhappy with the results—someone would end up disappointed that their choice wasn't picked. So, now we put all of our choices into the ‘list randomizer’ and generate a list that we visit in order. It works great!

—Doug Fessler, Ellensburg, Washington, USA

Dear Sir,

Came across your web site some time ago when I was dithering over what CDs to put in my 12-CD cassette in my car. In those days I had in excess of 500 CDs, and could never make up my mind which ones to listen to. I was tending to put just my favourites in week after week. I googled ‘Random Number,’ and your site was the result. I have now well over 700 CDs and religously put in the CDs that the number generator commands.

Thanks for the service.

—Malcolm Lashbrook

I am a teacher, and part of my student's grade is based on an in-class response to questions. I noticed that on some days, I was calling on the students who usually don't have the answers, and then on other days, I called on the better students.

To solve this, I produced a truly random class list for every class meeting. Now I don't have to think about who knows what, I just read the next name in the list.

—Jerid Krulish

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 write and use molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo simulators which have their own pseudo-random number generators (for portability and reproducibility). These require the user to input a random number seed. If I want to perform an ensemble of N statistically independent runs (e.g., with different initial conditions), I need N independent seeds. So I use your site to generate seeds to paste into my input script, i.e., your random generator generates random seeds for input to a pseudo-random generator. Say that 5 times fast.

—Steve Plimpton, Sandia National Labs

I'm an IT-consultant. I use Random.org regularly to generate random keys for www.coachteam.com, a coaching company who has to make sure the data of their clients is save and privacy is guaranteed. I use your random strings to update the Wi-Fi access points WPA2-keys every few months and to encrypt/decrypt client data in our database.

As a mathematical engineering graduate (University of Leuven, Belgium), I understand the difficulty about true randomness and I would like to thank you to make my work a little bit easier!

—David Ariens, Web Innovation, Belgium

Just wanted to say a quick thank you for your Random.org service. I was trying to demonstrate regression to the mean to my students and didn't have access to a statistical analysis program. So I jumped on the internet and had my numbers within a couple of minutes! Thanks!

—Bronwyn Clark

Hi, I'd like to thank you for making this great random generator! I discovered it a few days ago, looking for an online random integer generator for this roleplaying game I am setting up, and Random.org has more than met the requirements! I also admit, its quite fun to generate tens of thousands of binary codes, and translate them in a binary translator, to see what the ‘atmosphere’ is saying. Anyways, thanks a bunch!

—Meli Connor

My wife and I hit a lull in our sex life. The solution? We created an ‘Intimacy List.’ Basically a list of 8 intimate things we could do on any given night, running the gamut from ‘cuddle up’ to ‘you know what!’ Then every night we go to Random.org and pick an integer from 1 to 8. It's worked like a charm. Thanks!

—Paul Matthews

Interesting and useful website. Generated random order series for displaying candidate info for election to the board of a lifelong learning institute at George Mason University in Virginia (USA). Daughter Jessica is a Trinity alum—MBA. Looking forward to returning one day to Dublin. Thanks for the assistance!

—Richard and Brenda Cheadle

I am a person who loves stats. I do a lot of bingo cards and games. I use Random.org for …

1. Bingo Game No. 1–75 for my 18,000 cards, 90 bingo variations
2. The game of Racko No. 1–60
3. Memory using the 0–9 numbers each game I use 10K numbers
4. Now with the deck of cards I can study card games more often, I play cards on paper, any game using a deck of cards
5. maybe you can do a shuffler using Uno or Skip Bo or other card games

I thank you for making the site. It saves me time. I used to do the old fashion way of making game numbers, using a bingo cage and balls.

6. I also use the lottery and Keno Numbers too…

—Daniel Snyder, Butler, Missouri, USA

Dr. Haahr,

I used a list of your new random numbers in your new set generator for the dog races on Friday March 14, 2008. Using your sets on the last 4 of 13 races generated 2 trifectas. The sets I use are chosen by calculating over and over until the sets generated line up with the previous winning numbers. In this particular case I used races 1 through 9 and matched them with the sets generated. Of course there is not a 100% match for all numbers. However, the way the races are set up, the 1st three finishing positions are the ones to key on.

—Frank Hopkins

I am a DOT Compliance Consultant in Chicago IL (USA). I have several clients who are required to conduct random drug testing. I use your web site and I really like it. I just donated $20 to your favorite charity per your request and am notifying you of same per your request.

—Mike England

I help out with a internet poetry workshop and community called Neopoet. We elect members every three months to a board which governs the site.

I discovered Random.org while stranded in an airport lounge on the eve of our first election. I was waiting for my delayed flight while I realized I'd forgotten to randomize the ballot order. I pulled out my Blackberry and started searching for a way to generate random numbers. I quickly found your Random Sequence Generator. I wrote down the candidates on a slip of paper, then the assigned sequences from your site.

I was able to update the ballot just as the election was about to begin, and just a moment before the final boarding call was announced.

—Andrew A., New York, USA

I am a musician with a general fascination with randomness, computational complexity and the like. I also use the generator to produce 12-note tone rows, in which the integers 0–11 stand for the pitches C–B.

Basically I just think the whole thing is cool and I just want to show my support by checking out all the services which are available.

—Will Orzo

I make mixed media animations as a hobby, and have recently been exploring non-sequential abstract patterns, as both a visual ‘static’ effect, and as dynamic planes and surfaces for figures. While sometimes a typological approach appropriate, like taking a photo of a section of every page in the weekly newspaper and running it at high speed so it becomes non-figurative (to be used as an overcast sky), I often need more specific sorts of abstract, and drawing or otherwise generating thousands of frames of images, often for a minute or two of footage can be time consuming. So, I routinely get around this by making a fraction of that amount, and I used to pad the remaining time out by repeating frames in 'random' order, off the top of my own head, results less than impressive. Now, thanks to your random, I generate integers corresponding to existing frames, which eliminates obvious loops and repetitions, creating a much more believable and smooth non-sequential series.

Also, being subject to whimsy, I occasionally include snapshots of said numbers in the odd frame, or even the URL, considering it subliminal advertising.

—Dominic Brown

Hello,

I have been using the random sequence generator for about a year to create slot machine simulations for neuroscience experiments. Thanks so much, your site is great!

—Paul Campion, National Institutes of Health, USA

I wanted to both thank you for your random number generator and apologize for hogging the numbers today (I used up my quota and then went to my coworker's computer to get more numbers). I had to generate 50,000 random numbers for a project at work with only a couple hours' notice—we’re producing cards for a client as part of an instant win game, and each one needs a unique code—and your generator saved the day.

Plus, my coworkers already think I have mystical intellectual powers, and when I can come up with a solution like this in 15 minutes, it boggles their minds.

By the way, I love the user interface and the design of your site—it's simple and easy to use for non-mathematicians, and it has a nice clean, elegant feel to it.

Thanks again!

—Stephanie Dorenbosch, UCG Marketing

I have found the most fantastic use of your random number generator.

I use the first few lines of a 100 number sequence divided into five columns to predict future events in my life as far in the future as 6–8 months; for example, whether or not I should I should change careers (yes) or wait for a pay raise in my old job (no), whether or not I should change the engine belts in my car (no) or wait until September to do it (yes), whether or not I should ask my old girlfriend to marry me (no), whether or not I should ask the divorced lady who lives on my street to marry me (yes), if we should elope and get married in Las Vegas (yes), whether or not I should liquidate my 401(k) (yes) and invest in commodities options (accuracy = about 91%), whether or not I should refinance my house and accept fairly high refinancing fees (yes), and which religion is the correct faith (Catholicism scored the highest).

I'm looking at some really interestin numerological prophesies right now; for example, the Arizona Diamondbacks will win the pennant but lose in the World Series next October; unfortunately my mother and father are not going to leave me anything in their will when they pass on (they are going to live at least another ten years each anyway), and I am going to be reacquanited with a long lost friend in the next three weeks.

This is really great! Being able to predict the future using your random number generator has really helped me and my family make our most important decisions in life.

—David Hilton

I use Random.org to decide a sample population for individual studies. Last month when I went to generate the numbers it appeared the site was gone—but you're back! Thanks for this great free program.

—Sally B. Buttry, Quality and Safety Services, Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital, Illinois

My name is Jakub and I'm writing to thank you for the random number service that you have provided. Like many on your testimonial page, I have used the service and the numbers it provides to aid me in music composition using a mathematical music composition toolkit that I have devised myself. The aim is to create music procedurally with minimal human intervention without having it sound like 50s ‘blip-blop’ modernism. So far, the results have been very promising, in large part thanks to the ease of use and the quality of your random number generators.

I have a suggestion. Is there any plan or even a possibility of implementing a choice of different distributions of the numbers? The current setup produces integers with equal probability for each [white noise] but it would be good if the users could choose between different distributions such as white, pink and Brownian. This would be great, especially in the world of music.

Other than that, thanks once again for the great service. All the best to you.

—Jakub Gaudasinski

I use your website to assign random problems to the math students I tutor. Thank you very much.

—Gabriel Lichstein, Los Angeles

Greetings,

I just wanted to send you a note to say that we are using your web site to do random sampling for Sarbanes–Oxley compliance audits. We include screen prints of your web site to document our selection universe and the random integers generated. Thanks for making it available.

—Joe Glade, Resources Global Professionals, USA

I Googled onto your site to find a random number generator for my wife's PhD dissertation. She is doing a double blind type survey of medical residents. We used your tables to feed a MS Word macro that applies a random number (300 count) to each page of an 18-page survey. 300×18 is a big Word file. Then we printed the surveys as required for each school's survey requirements.

Your site is a great source and we appreciate your effort.

—Charles Lloyd

As part of the classes I teach, I task my students with preparing a lot of presentations. To save time & reduce boredom, I occasionally have only a portion of the student teams give their presentations. I use your Sequence Generator to pick who presents (& in what order), after they're ready to present (to keep them focused & accountable). Great website; please keep up the good work!

—Lt Col Chuck Stribula, Project Management Professional and Professor, Defense Acquisition University

Mr. Haahr,

I thought I would drop you a line to say ‘thank you’ for your random.org pages.

I am currently running a contest to celebrate the 10th anniversary of my website, and need an honest way to select winners from among the entrants. This evening I will have to make the first selection of winners and your tools will provide an excellent way of doing this … thank you!

—David Bull

I used Random.org in 2004 to create a sample of bibliographic records in OCLC WorldCat for a demographic study of that bibliographic database. The results were published in my article, ‘From the Ubiquitous to the Nonexistent: A Demographic Study of OCLC WorldCat,’ Library Resources & Technical Services 50 (2): 79-90, Spring 2006.

I have since taken two samples for further studies of WorldCat.

Download: PDF, 221 KiB

—Prof. Jay H. Bernstein, Kingsborough Community College, Brooklyn, New York

I produce 4 weekly booked open mics for stand-up comics in Manhattan. A typical show is only able to put up 24 comics in the two hour length of the show, and usually over 50 comics will reply to each week's invite to perform.

How best to determine who gets on and who gets mad?

You and your site have saved my bacon repeatedly. Thank you!

—John Morrison, Morrison Motel Comedy Show, New York City

I am the founder and administrator of 911Lifeline.org.

We are a forum, support, and resource center for public safety professionals who work as telecommunicators at 9-1-1 emergency dispatch centers. We provide our services via our Yahoo group, and our web site. We recently started drawings to recognize and reward our members. In particular, we are holding our first drawing to celebrate National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week.

NPSTW is an annual event that takes place during the first full week in April. It was officially created by a proclamation signed in 1994 by former U.S. president Bill Clinton. If you are interested, you can read the proclamation at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/print.php?pid=49952

Our members enter the drawings via email. At first, it was not clear how to fairly pick the winners, but then I became aware of Random.org. Each email is assigned a sequential number as it is received. Your random sequence generator is then used to randomize the entries. The first N numbers in the sequence, typically three, determine the winners.

Thank you for your fine resource, and public service.

Sincerely,

—Michael Wallach, 911Lifeline.org

I've just got several sets of random numbers & sequences off your generator to create pseudo-random ‘Three Letter Acronym’ puzzle keys in Younger Futharc runic. That old Danish script only has sixteen symbols, so lends itself to semi-cryptic ‘Hex’ applications.

Um, by the time I've finished collating the sets they'll be ‘pseudo-random,’ because there's a free key to begin, and several infuriating overlaps to complicate matters…

Thank you!

—Nik

I am high school student taking AP Statistics. I am using the random sequence generator for a major project studying if CSPAN has any political bias. Given the large size of their programming archive, I needed a way to randomly select which days and hours to research. Thank you Random.org!

—Alex Vincent

I found your random number generator really useful in my Maths Statistics coursework preparation for my GCSE so while I was using the web I found your brilliant site to help me along the way and made it easier than using a calculator! Thank you very much!

—Charlie Probert, Student, UK

Hey, just wanted to say thanks for your random sequence generator. I work for a clinic run by Peru Mission in the city of Trujillo, Peru. We used your sequence generator to do a USAID health survey in one of the poorer neighborhoods in La Esperanza. It was quick and provided exactly what we needed for carrying out the random survey. Thank you once again!

—Charles Wright

I am a pilot studying for my instrument rating (complicated procedures used for flying in clouds and low visibility) and I use your random number generator to generate simulated Air Traffic Control clearances. I substitute the numbers in for headings and bearings. It's great practice and I hope I'll ace the exam this way.

—Trevor Brooke

Thank you for offering the random number generator. I have used it for a research on the effects of target specific communications in a N=2000 population of Dutch War Veterans. In the experimental setting it was necessary to randomise the research population and to divide them over four sub-groups, similar in size. The only acceptable way was to do so by adding a randomised variable in SPSS. Afterwards it was possible to assign the subjects to one of the groups by sorting on the randomized variable. Of course I gave due credit in the report by mentioning your service and revealing the URL.

—drs. Rudy C. de Jong, Dronten Professional Agricultural University, The Netherlands

I just wanted to say thanks for the site. We use 5 digit long distance codes for our Osceola County phone system. Your site has made creating a random list of codes to issue to employees a breeze.

—Joel Gomer

Dr. Haahr, I have attached an article about how the U.S. Army used your website to successfully seat random court-martial panels in Germany. I credited you for establishing and maintaining Random.org at footnote 56.

Download: PDF, 150 KiB

—LTC Brad Huestis, Chief of the US Army Claims Service Europe

I just wanted to learn more about the world. I use numbers from your site to randomly pick 5 countries to pay a little extra attention to for the year. I also use the random numbers to come up with an age and sex for an imaginary citizen in that country and try to think about the country's recent history from their point of view.

—Sylvia Johnson

Hi,

I'm just writing to say a big thank you for creating your lovely sequence generator. It has helped me so much in my area of psychological research, very simply by creating a sequence for me to administer experimental tasks. But without it, my job would have been a lot more difficult.

Thank you very much.

—Meredith Blampied

I found your RNG under ‘Google – I feel lucky’ search and used the integer generator for picking 3 sets of lottery numbers and won on one of them. What the heck, it worked! Thanks for the generator, it's fun.

—Pat Cassady, Arlington, Virginia, USA

I use Random.org to generate random attribute numbers for sports video games when creating new players. Useful for putting my friends in the game without being tempted to make them really good. Most of the time they wind up as an average to good player, and every now and then they wind up as a superstar.

—Scott Bins, Green Bay, Wisconsin, USA

Hi, I'm using Random.org to seed the PRNG Mersenne Twister to create random passwords at goodpassword.com.

—David Jourard

I use Random.org to generate a random order for multiple stimuli used in human psychophysical testing. It's a welcome improvement over the book of random number tables I used in my youth, long ago.

—Professor Mark Dubin, University of Colorado

A group of seniors at my high-school decided to hold a ‘Random Gift Exchange’ on a day that held no religious or political significance, for no reason other than it would be fun! I used the random integer generator (along with my list of gifters) to match people up with their ‘secret-santa’ partners, totally randomly! To make things even more interesting, each gift must cost an exact and random amount, and our price this time is $8.27, which was also randomly selected thanks to the random integer generator. I know our Random Gift Exchange will be a success thanks to Random.org!!

—Blair McCulley, Port Alberni, Vancouver Island, BC, Canada

I'm a professional cellist, and I have a study book of about a thousand short technical exercises. I use your site like the sax player, Jeff, to pick a few at random to work on when I practise, so that I'm always working on a different aspect of my playing. It helps keep my music fresh.

—Jonathan Draper, UK

Thank you for your random number service, I have downloaded your 10 MB pre-generated numbers to use them for generating random noise to be added as dither to audio files in our audio products. Dithering works by adding random noise when decreasing bit-depth, such as going from 24 bit to 16 bit, allowing low volume signals that would be normally decimated to still be present, whilst the random signal increases the noise floor it normally remains inaudible.

—Mr Spoon, dbPowerAMP

I have many movie and sound files stored on my computer, in either groups (folders) or stand alone, and I have trouble deciding which to listen to or watch. Because a random function on a media player doesn't randomly select groups of songs or movies, I decided to find an alternative. Using a random integer generator, I can arbitrarily pick them at random. I use the site daily. Thanks.

—Marcus Stidham

In our newest game, Starships, we have made extensive use of your random numbers. Your random numbers are used in everything from the dispersement of game targets, rewards, patterns of asteroids … well EVERYTHING that should be random. The human mind can tell when something is truly random, and when it isn't, so your numbers make everything in the game look and feel right. THANK YOU!

—Archie Angelmann, Rabid Panda Games, USA

I am an Institutional Locksmith working for a large East Coast medical facility. While Mike Bardsley CML uses the generator for random key bittings, I use it to generate random six-digit combinations for electronic combination locks. We have many of these locks throughout our facility and need to assign each a different combination. Using your generator assures that we won't use the same combination more than once.

—Charles H. Park Jr. CIL

I'm using your random number generator to pick first and last names for characters from a spreadsheet for a computer game called ‘A Force More Powerful’—a game designed to teach nonviolent resistance groups how to fight for democracy without using violence.

—Karen Moody-Springer, BreakAway Games, USA

I have used your random list generator, as well as your random integer generator, to pick cells in a grid that was over-layed a digital picture of an area in order to randomly select wildlife sampling locations. It has been a most useful program, and has saved me a lot of time in getting my wildlife inventory and monitoring program up and running. Thanks a bunch!

—Dan Dawson, Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, University of Florida

I am an instructor of adult literacy and used your random numbers to generate questions in BEDMAS (order of operations) for my students. This saved me a lot of extra work and time. Thank you!

—Peter Fergus-Moore, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada

I think I've found the strangest use for Random.org's services: I retrieved a 256×256 random bitmap and changed the colors, and I use it as my Windows XP desktop wallpaper. I find that it's easier on the eyes than a large, screen-sized photograph; a small, repeated pattern; or even a solid color. I think of it as shag carpeting for the desktop. The two colors I actually use are #0055AA and #002B55, which I find fit well with the Windows XP color scheme. Now, what would be cool is if I could generate random bitmaps with more than two colors.

—Gus Polly

Firstly, thanks for Random.org. Excellent! Secondly, here's what I use Random.org for. To protect me from keyboard and mouse loggers when I'm at an Internet cafe, I use Random.org to give me a page of random numbers, from which I pick my password pieces and copy and paste them into a log in form. That way, the next time the page is served the numbers will be in a different place. Thirdly, to make this even more secure, I would love to be able to get a page of randomly organised letters (a-z) (and maybe even punctuation!) for my passwords. Thanks again!

—Peter Lovett, Australia

We use the random number generator for determining what events take place in our simulated political landscape. The administrators develop probabilities of likely outcomes of a certain event, then use the random generators to determine which events take place. It's very useful, thanks!

—Brady Carlson, American Government Simulation

I'm yet another musician who has found Random.org very useful. Much of my music for jazz orchestra is centered around improvisation, so when I write certain passages (especially ones using twelve-tone rows), I don't want to influence the choices of notes and use your sequences tool. Also, I practice saxophone from a book with over 1300 scales & patterns to choose from. To keep things interesting, I have random.org give me 10 or 20 numbers for each day's practice. Thank you for the great site!

—Jeff Sackmann, Astoria, New York, USA

I just wanted to let you know that and how I've used your delightful service. In the course of writing my thesis I needed to be able to randomly assign 15 items to five different categories and then randomly order the categories. I was going to use old fashioned D&D dice for the job but found your site and was able to do it in far less time! Thanks a lot, and you will be cited in my final document.

—Rose Campbell, Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology, Oregon Health & Science University

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

We are a charter high school in Chesterfield, Virginia, USA. I use Random.org to assign numbers to student applications. We always have more applicants than positions available, so the most fair way to determine who gets offered a position at our school is using Random.org to generate random sequences for a lottery. Thank you for making this process so easy for me; no one can question the fairness of your truly random numbers.

—Kelly Kennedy, Chesterfield Community High School, Virginia, USA

Hello and thank you. You have provided an easy, unbiased and scientific format for me to pick sweepstakes winners. We are a full service direct marketing and promotions company in Chicago and often have the need to handle a sweepstake pick. We've used your site to pick sweepstakes winners of airline travel, baseball games, pool tables, and various other prizes. So for all those lucky winners—you really are randomly selected! Thanks again.

—Sarah Bender, Make It Direct, Chicago, USA

Thanks so much for your site. I've been using it for several years. As a Romani (Gypsy) I have a personal set of the Drom Romani that functions as a daily guidance system. Working in a stressful job (Financial Aid at a community college), I sometimes need to find some ‘quickie’ guidance. Your page is in my favorites and it is easy to access. I use the first random number in your list. If it is more than 22 (the amount of cards in the Drom) I add the numbers together. Then I match it in my mind to the proper card. For instance, number 14 is E Mara (the Sea) and it tells me to go with the flow, be relaxed, retain a sense of humor! Hope this doesn't sound frivolous to you because it isn't to me. It aids my spiritual development on a daily basis.

—Viata Maya

I am a medical librarian and yesterday I hosted an open house at the library to celebrate all the changes we have made recently. As part of our celebration (and for incentive to drop in), I offered door prizes. A friend in our tech dept helped me set up and configure an extra time clock, so that all visitors had to do to register was swipe their employee badge. After downloading this to Excel, I used your generator to generate 3 numbers to determine winners of our door prizes. Easy peasie, one two three-sie!

—Lyn Ashby

Hooray for the Rogan Family! My sister Katherine married into this lovely family, and now I get to administer their holiday gift exchange! I use Random.org to ensure that the drawing of names is above reproach! A random holiday is a happy holiday!

—Adam Menendez, Portland, Oregon

I just came upon your website while trying to generate random numbers on a spreadsheet. I hadn't installed the feature and I was too lazy to look for the CD! My purpose is rather lame, I suppose, but I'm in a monthly contest to win yarn from PT Yarn, and I have to choose 15 of 31 yarn names for a lottery every month. Your number generator made it quick and simple.

—Nancy Milstone

I am using the number generator to randomly assign research participants in an experiment. It's very important that anonymity be maintained, as the questionnaires they answer contain very personal info. I use the generator to assign numbers to each folder, then when people come in they get the next folder in the stack. I am also a lecturer in statistics at the University of New Mexico and will be using the generator to talk about probability! Thanks!

—Marianna D. LaNoue, Department of Psychology, University of New Mexico

Hello! I am an admirer of the Random.org web site! I have implemented a Virtual Coin Toss web page that allows multiple parties in different locations to perform a virtual coin toss which they all can verify separately. On this site, a virtual coin toss (ie, a zero or one) is fetched from random.org once every minute, is stored for some number of days, and can be looked up through a simple form. So, for instance, two individuals can agree to use the toss that will occur at some particular, approaching time; they can then separately view the coin toss as it occurs or look it up later.

—Daniel Singer, Department of Computer Science, Duke University

My original reason to look for a random integer generator was to obtain some numbers for a lottery. However, independent of this specific intention, I wanted to use a ‘good and nice’ generator. Then I found yours and I like the principle on which it is based very much. Also it is very convenient because it offers many options. It was just the perfect generator for which I was looking for! I appreciate your work very much to establish this random integer generator.

—Frank Lichtenberg, University of Augsburg, Germany

I used your sequence generator to run a lottery for English as Second Language Services at Northwestern University (Chicago Campus). Each year we have more students applying for tutoring slots than there are spaces available, so this year we ran a lottery to determine who would receive a slot. Thanks for making this process easier!

—Julia Moore, Director of the English as a Second Language Program, Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University

The San Marcos Police Dept. in San Marcos, TX, USA was in need of a number generator to identify people at random through our case number systems who, over the course of a year, had filed police reports. We were conducting a survey to ascertain the level of satisfaction our ‘victims’ had with the police service we provided them. Using your generator, I was able to pull random numbers from 1 through 58,000. It worked perfectly. THANK YOU!

—Cmdr. Warren A. Zerr, San Marcos Police Dept.

Just wanted to send you a thank you for the random number website. Random.org was the perfect solution for us. We use your site to randomly select monthly winners for our free AT&T prepaid phone card contest.

—Kevin Waite, President, InstaPhoneCard, USA

Here at Bitbuzz, we use Random.org to generate access token for our users. They are given a paper token with four words printed on it, and we use Random.org to generate these word sequences from a list of thousands of words. Much easier to copy into a form than a password, and just as secure!

—Alex French, Bitbuzz, Ireland

I'm an aspiring Dungeon Master (the guy behind the screen Toto warns you about) and I use Random.org for everything, nearly. Character stats, I simulate 6 sets of 3 six sided dice for a quick and dirty ‘customized’ character. If I need a map quickly, I use the Dungeon's Masters Guide dice tables and simulate about 100 dice rolls for dungeon layout, decoration, and monster placement. Random encounters, check. In fact I could use Random.org for all my needs, as the entire D&D game is based on the random rolls of 6, 8, 10, 20, or 100 sided dice. But where's the fun in that? I'm planning to move my computer (one of them) to my den so I can run rolls quicker than normal, but I think I'll keep my big bag o' dice at my side just to keep my players on their toes. Thanks for the great service!

—Brian Rouse

Hello, We use Random.org to select random invoice numbers for financial auditing. We recently instituted a self-auditing program as a part of our compliance with Sarbanes–Oxley legislation. Auditing standards often require random selections, and Random.org helps us in this area by giving us a documented and supportable source of random numbers.

—Dan C. Smith, TABS Direct, USA

A friend of mine suggested that I use Random.org to generate 128 bit (16 byte) WEP keys for 802.11a or 802.11b wireless cards. Works great!

—Phillip Remaker, Cisco, USA

Thank you for your work you have done on your random page. I stumbled upon it one day and use it regularly to generate numbers for random drug screens. We are a worldwide contractor who works in construction and pipe manufacturing, among other things. We are very progressive in our drug free workplace program and do randoms on a quarterly basis. I recommend this site to anyone who needs to pull numbers for any random purpose. Thanks again for the hard work.

—Gregory M. Glueck, The Shaw Group, USA

Dr. Haahr, just a quick thank-you for your Random.org website. I run a weekly contest for elderly residents of retirement homes in the US, and I have to select a prize winner from all the people who submit correct answers. So every week I assign sequential numbers to all the correct entries, and use your website to select the winner! Just thought you'd like to know your website is a valuable resource for us. Thanks again.

—Jeff Pepper, Touchtown, Inc., USA

Hi! I'm writing a book and have all of my notecards numbered. I use the random generator to pick out the next two cards I'm going to ‘connect.’ It's perfect because the book is about integration and so, in theory, any two random cards should be related, even if the topics are completely different. Thanks!

—Hetty Witham

I'm using the random numbers to help me create block ciphers for custom encryption routines. I do this more out of fun though a lot of my ‘research’ ends up in production systems. I've actually contributed to your third party HTTP clients. I wrote the ASP contribution. I'm particularly pleased to see the sequence generator. This is absolutely critical for my latest project—developing an ASCII friendly encryption routine for email and web use. In this sort of application, I use ASCII values with a value 32 pedestal and a 126 threshold to eliminate any special characters from being used (and likely altered) by an email or web transfer protocol. Results thus far have been great.

—Randy Tate

I stoppped on your web site to look for a random number to help me decide which chores to do first. That led me to your personal webpage. I admire your work and generosity very much!

—Vicky Barrio

Dear Randomizers: I'm an undergraduate doing my first big research project. The whole idea seemed a little random, but I realized most of my classmates, as well as former students, lose the power of their study over having a nonrandom sample. Your generator made choosing a truly random sample, easy and intriguing. I was able to have a different set of numbers for each group without more than a few clicks. You've helped put me to the head of the class!

—Christine Whetmore, Southern Adventist University

I'm an artist in New Harmony, Indiana. I've used your site to help generate a random sequece of elements for use in a ‘quasi’ random piece of music I'm completing. It's called The Utility Project, as all of the artists are playing a utilitarian role and allowing a pair of dice to make the creative decisions. I was very happy to discover Random.org.

—Doyle R. Dean

I used your generator to distribute 15 colored tiles in random positions among 70 white tiles for my front entrance. I knew I would be looking at this entrance for years and did not want to see a self-made ‘optimal’ pattern that I would eventually hate, so this way I can blame it all on you! Kidding. I just like color to be uniquely spread out.

—Tom Pankratz

I use your random numbers to assign grades for students' exams answers. It is quicker than reading them all … No, I don't really … just kidding! Actually I use your random numbers to decide which lectures to base the exam questions on, since there is not enough time in the exam to ask an essay question on every lecture.

—Professor Hughes Goldie, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Saskatchewan

We are a medical lab located in Trinidad and we also do drug and alcohol testing. We are responsible for random selection of employees to be tested from various clients. We use Random.org for periodic random selection of employees for drug testing because it is better than Excel which most Companies use. This is a good selling point and when we explain to Companies the difference they are sold on the application!

—Jenny Narinesing, Lab Medica Services, Trinidad

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

We run monthly contests on our site and I must say Random.org has been very helpful. We use it to choose our winners and it has been fair and just fine.

—Dorette, Abusaki's Corner, USA

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

I used your random number page to get truly random numbers between 0–99 in order to study the Monte Carlo method for arithmetic solution of problems and to simulate the beta decay of nuclei. Thanks a lot, it saved me the trouble of having to input into MS Excel, 500 numbers, which were pseudo-random, anyway.

—Yannis Thomopoulos, Department of Physics, University of Athens

I am in your debt for providing a service compatible with directions in advanced musical composition. I have used your service to generate systems of random digits integral to my compositional processes. It will not come as a surprise if other artists exploring extended musical forms and cross-media find your help valuable in their work.

—Michael Byron

I use Random.org to generate random numbers for a random sample of informants when I conduct surveys. It really beats using the dart board or hat.

—Rod Stubina, Department of Anthropology, University of Florida

I am using your random number generator to pull unique 6-digit odd integers between 100,000 and 999,999 as unique seed numbers for a random sample I will use to study the load shapes of our electric utility customers. We pull samples for each of our rate classifications. Thanks for making this available, and easy to use.

—Bob Smith, OG&E Electric Services, USA

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

I am local content editor for our local on-line service. We use Random.org to select a winner for our weekly trivia contest. We give full credit to Random.org on the page. We've also used it to select winners of other contests for the web site.

—Chad Gilley, Around Town, Road Runner of Maine, USA

I am currently using your random number generator to produce lists of numbers from 0 to 11 (notes in the chromatic scale) and 0 to 6 (notes in a diatonic scale) that will later be assigned pitch names and used in a musical composition entitled, ‘Millennial Chances’ for violin, clarinet, and piano … a work commissioned by the Verdehr Trio, a trio in residence at Michigan State University. I wanted a composition whose pitch set is derived from random processes and have plans to to several more in the same vein. I've been looking for several years for a resource such as this as was pleasantly surprised to find your wonderful and useful tool.

—Harold Cowherd