A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates is a 1955 book by the RAND Corporation. The book of tables 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 punch cards. The main use of the tables was in statistics and the experimental design of scientific experiments, especially those which employed 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 with a new foreword by RAND Executive Vice President Michael D. Rich.
References
- 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.
