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:
“When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“And catch the gleaming of a random light,
That tells me that the ship I seek is passing, passing.”
—Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906)
“Dada doubts everything. Dada is an armadillo. Everything is Dada, too. Beware of Dada. Anti-dadaism is a disease: selfkleptomania, man’s normal condition, is Dada. But the real dadas are against Dada.”
—Tristan Tzara (1896–1963)