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A random number book is a
A random number book is a book
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physi ...
whose main content is a large number of random numbers or random digits. Such books were used in early cryptography
Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adver ...
and experimental design
The design of experiments (DOE, DOX, or experimental design) is the design of any task that aims to describe and explain the variation of information under conditions that are hypothesized to reflect the variation. The term is generally associ ...
, and were published by the Rand Corporation and others. The Rand corporation book ''A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates
''A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates'' is a random number book by the RAND Corporation, originally published in 1955. The book, consisting primarily of a random number table, was an important
20th century work in the field of ...
'' was first published in 1955 and was reissued in 2001. A sequel, '' A Million And One Random Digits'' was published in 2022.
Random number books have been rendered obsolete for most purposes by the ready availability of random number generator
Random number generation is a process by which, often by means of a random number generator (RNG), a sequence of numbers or symbols that cannot be reasonably predicted better than by random chance is generated. This means that the particular outc ...
s running on electronic computer
A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These program ...
s. However they still have niche uses, particularly in the performance of experimental music pieces that call for them, such as ''Vision'' (1959) and ''Poem'' (1960) by La Monte Young.
See also
*One-time pad
In cryptography, the one-time pad (OTP) is an encryption technique that cannot be cracked, but requires the use of a single-use pre-shared key that is not smaller than the message being sent. In this technique, a plaintext is paired with a ran ...
* Random number table
Random number tables have been used in statistics for tasks such as selected randomness, random samples. This was much more effective than manually selecting the random samples (with dice, cards, etc.). Nowadays, tables of random numbers have been ...
References
Random number generation 20th-century books Books by type {{music-stub