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. Pulse standardization circuits passed the pulses through a 5-place binary counter. 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.
The random digits in this book were produced by rerandomization of a basic table generated by an electronic roulette wheel. The Monte Carlo Method, 1951 Curtiss, 1949 Kahn and Marshall, 1953 and Kahn, 1956, discuss the uses and applications of the Monte Carlo methods and give references to other applications. These developments are summarized in Juncosa, 1953 Meyer, Gephart, and Rasmussen, 1954 and Moshman, 1954, where other references may be found.
With the high-speed electronic computers recently developed, the storage of such tables is usually not practical and, in fact, much larger tables than the present one are often required these machines have caused research workers to turn to pseudo-random numbers which are computed by simple arithmetic processes directly by the machine as needed. The tables were constructed primarily for use with punched card machines. The feasibility of working with as large a table as the present one resulted from developments in computing machinery which made possible the solving of very complicated distribution problems in a reasonable time by Monte Carlo methods. On numerous RAND problems the largest existing table of Kendall and Smith, 1939, would have had to be used many times over, with the consequent dangers of introducing unwanted correlations. One distinguishing feature of the digit table is its size. The numbers have been used extensively by research workers at RAND, and by many others, in the solution of a wide range of problems during the past seven years. Many of the applications required a large supply of random digits or normal deviates of high quality, and the tables presented here were produced to meet those requirements. IntroductionĮarly in the course of research at The RAND Corporation a demand arose for random numbers these were needed to solve problems of various kinds by experimental probability procedures, which have come to be called Monte Carlo methods. These tables were prepared in connection with analyses done for the United States Air Force. The following persons participated in the production, testing, and preparation for publication of the tables of random digits and random normal deviates: Paul Armer, E. Still the largest known source of random digits and normal deviates, the work is routinely used by statisticians, physicists, polltakers, market analysts, lottery administrators, and quality control engineers.Ī humorous sidelight: The New York Public Library originally indexed this book under the heading "Psychology." Acknowledgments The tables of random numbers in the book have become a standard reference in engineering and econometrics textbooks and have been widely used in gaming and simulations that employ Monte Carlo trials. This book was a product of RAND's computing power (and patience).
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