''A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates'' is a random number book by the

RAND Corporation The RAND Corporation, doing business as RAND, is an American nonprofit global policy think tank, research institute, and public sector consulting firm. RAND engages in research and development (R&D) in several fields and industries. Since the ...

, originally published in 1955. The book, consisting primarily of a random number table, was an important 20th century work in the field of

statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a s ...

and random numbers.

Production and background

It was produced starting in 1947 by an electronic simulation of a roulette wheel attached to a

computer A computer is a machine that can be Computer programming, programmed to automatically Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic set ...

, 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 card A punched card (also punch card or punched-card) is a stiff paper-based medium used to store digital information via the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Developed over the 18th to 20th centuries, punched cards were widel ...

s. The table is formatted as 400 pages, each containing 50 lines of 50 digits. Columns and lines are grouped in fives, and the lines are numbered 00000 through 19999. The

standard normal deviate Standard may refer to: Symbols * Colours, standards and guidons, kinds of military signs * Standard (emblem), a type of a large symbol or emblem used for identification Norms, conventions or requirements * Standard (metrology), an object t ...

s are another 200 pages (10 per line, lines 0000 through 9999), with each deviate given to three decimal places. There are 28 additional pages of

front matter Book design is the graphic art of determining the visual and physical characteristics of a book. The design process begins after an author and editor finalize the manuscript, at which point it is passed to the production stage. During productio ...

Utility

The main use of the tables was in statistics and the experimental design of scientific experiments, especially those that used the

Monte Carlo method Monte Carlo methods, or Monte Carlo experiments, are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. The underlying concept is to use randomness to solve problems that might be ...

; in

cryptography Cryptography, or cryptology (from "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logy, -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of Adversary (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 to 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.

2001 edition

The book was reissued in 2001 () with a new foreword by RAND Executive Vice President Michael D. Rich. It has generated many humorous user reviews on Amazon.com.

Sample

The digits begin:

References

Additional sources

* George W. Brown, "History of RAND's random digits—Summary," in A.S. Householder, G.E. Forsythe, and H.H. Germond, eds., ''Monte Carlo Method, National Bureau of Standards Applied Mathematics Series'', 12 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1951): 31–32. (Availabl
here
for download from the RAND Corporation.) *

External links

A Million Random Digits' Was a Number-Cruncher's Bible. Now One Has Exposed Flaws in the Disorder. at wsj.com
{{DEFAULTSORT:Million Random Digits with 100, 000 Normal Deviates, A 1955 non-fiction books Probability books RAND Corporation Mathematical tables Random number generation