Testimonials

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

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