4
$\begingroup$

In the mid 1940's I believe, the RAND corporation published a book with a million random numbers (from a normal distribution). This was before Marsaglia, so considering the primitive state of their knowledge in testing for randomness, how did they generate these numbers and how did they test them? I ask this b/c I always get the sense that people in the field seem to regard this source as the "gold standard", although it is not obvious at all to me that this should be the case.

Thanks, Jack

  • 0
    @joriki You are quite right!2012-09-30

1 Answers 1

1

The book is A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates. The introduction, freely available here, explains in detail how the numbers were generated and tested.

  • 0
    Thanks. I had heard someone say how little documentation the book contained, so I didn't look at the intro. It still doesn't really explain how the process works (esp if you don't know what an electronic roulette wheel is), so I can't say I still understand it, but at least I know where to start to investigate. The tests used are a little better explained.2012-10-01