True Random Number Service

Testimonials - Simulation and Modelling

RANDOM.ORG is a true random number service that generates randomness via atmospheric noise. This page contains testimonials from users of the service.

Seeding Molecular Dynamics and Monte Carlo Simulations

From: Steve Plimpton from Sandia National Labs
Date: 18 August 2008
I write and use molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo simulators which have their own pseudo-random number generators (for portability and reproducibility). These require the user to input a random number seed. If I want to perform an ensemble of N statistically independent runs (e.g. with different initial conditions), I need N independent seeds. So I use your site to generate seeds to paste into my input script. I.e. your random generator generates random seeds for input to a pseudo-random generator. Say that 5 times fast.

Neuroscience Experiments

From: Paul Campion from the US National Institutes of Health
Date: 13 October 2007
Hello, I have been using the random sequence generator for about a year to create slot machine simulations for neuroscience experiments. Thanks so much, your site is great!

American Government Simulation

From: Brady Carlson who is administrator for the American Government Simulation
Date: 8 March 2005
[We] use the random number generator for determining what events take place in our simulated political landscape. The administrators develop probabilities of likely outcomes of a certain event, then use the random generators to determine which events take place. It's very useful, thanks!

Noisy Transistor Simulation

From: Pepin Torres from Revere, Massachusetts in USA
Date: 7 December 2004
I used random.org to simulate noisy transistors in circuit simulations for a school project (and made sure to credit random.org for the data in the report!)

Voting Theory Project

From: Patrick Ayers
Date: 7 January 2004
My name is Patrick Ayers, a Junior in high school in Florida. I am doing a research project on voting theory, and I used numbers from random.org to order candidates on the ballots as well as assign which group of voter would use which system of elections.

Virus Infection Simulation

From: David N. Levy from the University of Alabama at Birmingham
Date: 21 February 2002
Donation: Mads's Amazon Wishlist
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 the pseudorandom 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!

Beta Decay of Nuclei

From: Yannis Thomopoulos from the Physics Department at the University of Athens
Date: 3 June 2001
I used your random number page to get truly random numbers between 0-99 in order to study the Monte-Carlo method for arithmetic solution of problems and to simulate the beta decay of nuclei. Thanx a lot, it saved me the trouble of having to input into Ms-Excel, 500 numbers, which were pseudo-random, anyway.