True Random Number Service

4 November 2008

Lots of behind-the-scenes server maintenance has been performed over the past months, but there are also some visible improvements to RANDOM.ORG:

The brand new Gaussian Random Number Generator can generate random numbers from a Gaussian distribution.
The Calendar Date Generator, the Clock Time Generator and the Decimal Fraction Generator are now free and no longer require a Premium Account.
The Integer Set Generator still requires a Premium Account, but has new, fancy sorting options.
There is now a list of hosts that have been permanently banned for violating the Client Guidelines.
The Possible Lessnesses site, based on a work by Samuel Beckett, is now hosted at RANDOM.ORG. Access is free but requires a password due to copyright considerations. Email e@lessness.org to get the password.

23 June 2008

The Premium Generator now supports email notifications. This feature has been requested by many users, especially players of strategy games.

10 June 2008: New services

A couple of great new additions:

The brand new Sound Generator allows you to generate random sound samples. They may sound like radio noise, but a spectrum analysis will reveal that they have a much more uniform power level distribution across the frequency range.
The new Calendar Date Generator allows you to pick random dates within a specified interval and subject to weekday constraints.

21 May 2008: New services

It has been a while since I've added new features, but here they finally are:

There is now a fancy Card Shuffler, which will shuffle configurable decks of playing cards and pick cards from them.
The shiny new Set Generator allows you to generate multiple sets of random numbers at the same time.
There is now a Quota Check function that can easily be used by automated clients to check their current bit allowance.
All pages now contain a search box.

7 December 2007: Premium services

A couple of big changes this month:

The Premium Generator is now officially open. It can be considered a flexible alternative to the Sequence Generator and Integer Generator, and it also features very handy trails that can be used to remember the last 10 times you used it. Trails are useful if you need to pick a random number with someone who is in a different location.
Registration for Premium Accounts is now open, and payments are accepted via PayPal. At this point, an account gives you full access to the Premium Generator. In the future, other premium services will be made available to RANDOM.ORG account holders.
To anyone who is curious, I am in the process of finalising changes to the Third-Party Draw Service. Please inquire if you are impatient or if you're interested in getting access to a trial account that will let you test drive this service.

30 October 2007: New functionality

Some more changes:

Instant quota top-ups can now be purchased via PayPal.
Cute halloween logo in place :-)
Two new sections were added to the FAQ, one on the quota system and one on documentation and media coverage.
Changed configuration to an IBM eServer machine with nice SCSI disks.
More lotteries added to the Quick Picker.

14 August 2007: New functionality

A few additions:

A Clock Time Generator was added that allows random points in time to be generated within a given interval.
The new Fraction Generator can generate decimal fractions in the [0;1] interval.
A bunch of new lotteries were added to the Lottery Quick Pick form.
Keno Quick Pick was added as distinct from Lottery Quick Pick because keno (as opposed to most lotteries) allows a variable number of numbers to be played on each ticket.
A bug in my CSS style sheet was fixed that caused numbers generated to be printed with a very small font in some browsers.

11 June 2007: More minor updates

A few more changes:

Due to popular request, Lottery Quick Pick now supports lotteries with multiple types of balls (e.g., bonus balls).
The Integer Generator's Advanced Mode now supports hexadecimal, decimal, octal and binary.
An Information Entropy Test was added to the statistics.
The graphs for the current day are now generated every hour, so you can monitor the progress of today's statistics.
The server was updated to Debian 4 (‘Etch’).
The server upgrade caused a bug to occur in the bitmap generator; this has been fixed.

10 May 2007: Minor updates

Over the last month, the following changes have been made:

A broken parameter check in the coin flipper has been fixed, which allowed someone to ask for a gazillion coins to be flipped. Although this didn't break the server per se, flipping a gazillion coins does use a lot of random numbers.
A bug in the timestamping has been fixed, causing the timestamps printed on the pages to run behind by up to one hour.
The server now uses pure GMT, i.e., Greenwich Mean Time without adjustment for daylight savings time. I'm still undecided whether it's easier for people in other time zones to convert to/from pure GMT or Irish Summer Time (IST), which is essentially just GMT with adjustment for daylight savings time. If you have an opinion on this, drop me a line.
The multi-column format for the Integer Generator has been reintroduced by popular request.
A bunch of US coins have been added to the coin flipper.
A list of peer-reviewed citations has been added to the Media and Citations page.
My homebrew log rotation program for the statistics logs has been replaced with cronolog, which is actually a much better solution.

8 April 2007: Minor updates

The new server is performing well and seems quite capable of keeping up with demands. A couple of more features have been added:

Support for SSL.
Several people reported they thought the new features on some of the forms (e.g., the Integer Generator) were a little confusing and cluttered the interfaces. The features were important to some hardcore users of RANDOM.ORG but not relevant for most people, so I have moved them to an Advanced Mode on the respective forms, which I think actually works much better.
A major change to the quota system that should allow much better utilisation.
Miscellaneous bug fixes related mostly to differences in JavaScript support between different browsers.

If you find bugs or have suggestions, let me know!

1 April 2007: New server goes online!

No, this is not an April's Fools joke... The new setup, which has been in the works for a year and a half, is finally replacing the old. This is a major overhaul of the software, so except for the quality of the numbers (which remains exactly the same as the old server), I'm expecting there may be a few inconveniences from things breaking. However, I hope it will be worth it in the end. The old server is still around at old.random.org for the moment, but it's running at reduced speed (with only one radio), so I strongly encourage you to use the new one.

Please send me any feedback (good and bad) you have on the new setup!

Here is a partial list of new features:

The back-end has been completely rewritten to use the ALSA audio libraries. The approach is completely the same as the old server, though, and my tests show the numbers to be exactly the same quality (i.e., as good) as the old.
A three-radio setup now offers a total generator capacity of 6,000 bits per second, which is over twice as fast as the old setup.
The dynamic content has been nearly completely migrated from CGI scripts to PHP. This makes it much easier for me to maintain it, which means improvements will appear more frequently in the future.
First steps towards migration towards much better statistics based on the NIST test suite instead of the ent program. Check out the fancy new graphs and the stats browser. (While I don't have graphs for the whole NIST suite online yet, the numbers have of course passed the whole suite, as described on the analysis page.)
Some new interfaces have been added, such as the Jazz Scale Generator and the List Randomizer.
Many of the interfaces now support pregenerated randomizations, either generated on specific days in the past or based on persistent identifiers. If you don't know what this means, it is probably not relevant to you, and you can continue using the service as always. You will find more details in the FAQ.
The draconian and erratic script that I used to ban clients that didn't conform to the guidelines has been replaced with a much superior quota system. You are restricted to 1,000,000 free bits per day, but top-ups are free for now. The much-ignored checkbuf script still exists (and works) but isn't really important anymore.
New and better interfaces for automatic clients. The old ones should be retained for now, but may disappear in the future.
My essay about randomness has received a much-needed update.
Much improved web design based on XHTML and CSS. Thanks to TSDA for donating it!

Some things that remain to get done:

Port some of the clients from the old server to use the new interfaces. If you update them and send them to me, I will put them on the new server.
CORBA and SOAP services.
Probably about a million other things... Tell me!