Testimonials

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 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