A Million Random Numbers
Friday, October 13, 2006 at 1:54PM Bruce Schneier wrote a short piece today about the Rand Corporations book, "A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Derivatives." This book, originally published in 1955, served to provide random numbers when it was nearly impossible to generate random numbers. Now even Excel has a random function RND().
Schneier offers this up from Rand:
The random digits in the book were produced by rerandomization of a basic table generated by an electronic roulette wheel. Briefly, a random frequency pulse source, providing on the average about 100,000 pulses per second, was gated about once per second by a constant frequency pulse. Pulse standardization circuits passed the pulses through a 5-place binary counter. In principle the machine was a 32-place roulette wheel which made, on the average, about 3000 revolutions per trial and produced one number per second. A binary-to-decimal converter was used which converted 20 of the 32 numbers (the other twelve were discarded) and retained only the final digit of two-digit numbers; this final digit was fed into an IBM punch to produce finally a punched card table of random digits.
Apparently Amazon is carrying republished versions of this book. And as Schneier notes, the user reviews are hysterical.
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