A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates is a 1955 book by the RAND Corporation. The book, consisting primarily of a random number table, was an important 20th century work in the field of statistics and random numbers. It was produced starting in 1947 by an electronic simulation of a roulette wheel attached to a computer, the results of which were then carefully filtered and tested before being used to generate the table. The RAND table was an important breakthrough in delivering random numbers, because such a large and carefully prepared table had never before been available. In addition to being available in book form, one could also order the digits on a series of punched cards. The main use of the tables was in statistics and the experimental design of scientific experiments, especially those that used the Monte Carlo method; in cryptography, they have also been used as nothing up my sleeve numbers, for example in the design of the Khafre cipher. The book was one of the last of a series of random number tables produced from the mid-1920s through the 1950s, after which the development of high-speed computers allowed faster operation through the generation of pseudorandom numbers rather than reading them from tables.
The book was reissued in 2001 (ISBN 0-8330-3047-7) with a new foreword by RAND Executive Vice President Michael D. Rich. It has generated many humorous user reviews on Amazon.com.
The digits and the deviates are available for free online, at: Datafile: A Million Random Digits and 100,000 Normal Deviates. The text of the book is also available at . They begin:
- 1, 0, 0, 9, 7, 3, 2, 5, 3, 3, 7, 6, 5, 2, 0, 1, 3, 5, ... (sequence A002205 in OEIS)
Famous quotes containing the words million, random and/or normal:
“To think to know the country and not know
The hillside on the day the sun lets go
Ten million silver lizards out of snow!”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Assemble, first, all casual bits and scraps
That may shake down into a world perhaps;
People this world, by chance created so,
With random persons whom you do not know—”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)
“Separation anxiety is normal part of development, but individual reactions are partly explained by experience, that is, by how frequently children have been left in the care of others.... A mother who is never apart from her young child may be saying to him or her subliminally: “You are only safe when I’m with you.””
—Cathy Rindner Tempelsman (20th century)