Testimonials

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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