Testimonials

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 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