''A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates'' is a

random number book A random number book is a book whose main content is a large number of random numbers or random digits. Such books were used in early cryptography and experimental design, and were published by the Rand Corporation and others. The Rand corporati ...

by the

RAND Corporation The RAND Corporation (from the phrase "research and development") is an American nonprofit global policy think tank created in 1948 by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. It is financ ...

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

Production and background

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 card A punched card (also punch card or punched-card) is a piece of stiff paper that holds digital data represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Punched cards were once common in data processing applications or to di ...

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 A standard normal deviate is a normally distributed deviate. It is a realization of a standard normal random variable, defined as a random variable with expected value 0 and variance 1.Dodge, Y. (2003) The Oxford Dictionary of Statisti ...

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.

Utility

The main use of the tables was in statistics and the

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 ...

scientific experiment An experiment is a procedure carried out to support or refute a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of something previously untried. Experiments provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs when ...

s, 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 deter ...

; in

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 adve ...

, they have also been used as

nothing up my sleeve number In cryptography, nothing-up-my-sleeve numbers are any numbers which, by their construction, are above suspicion of hidden properties. They are used in creating cryptographic functions such as hashes and ciphers. These algorithms often need rand ...

s, 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 A pseudorandom sequence of numbers is one that appears to be statistically random, despite having been produced by a completely deterministic and repeatable process. Background The generation of random numbers has many uses, such as for random ...

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 The RAND Corporation (from the phrase "research and development") is an American nonprofit global policy think tank created in 1948 by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. It is finance ...

. 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