A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates

Common card · No. 321651

A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates is a 1955 compilation of random numbers created by the RAND Corporation and published by the Free Press. Demand for large volumes of random digits had increased in the 1940s and 1950s, as Monte Carlo simulations (which require many random values) gained popularity in physics and applied mathematics. The RAND Corporation is a think tank and research center that was associated with the United States military during the Cold War. It was limited in its calculations by the size of the largest previously available compilation, a 1939 volume of 100,000 random digits. To produce digits, the Douglas Aircraft Company partnered with RAND in 1947 to create a vacuum tube computer to be used as what RAND described as an "electronic roulette wheel". The fluctuations of electrical pulses through a circuit board were measured once a second and converted into binary data, which was later converted into decimal, then into data tables. After the initial...

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