Talk:A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates

old comments

Damnit, I accidently blanked the page. Does anyone have a backup copy? Edit: thanks Malo -SB

I thought this article was longer. It used to mention the copyright arguemnet, didn't it? TaylorSAllen 02:44, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

It seems a shame not to mention the enthusiastic and creative reviews this book has attracted on Amazon... --144.53.251.2 (talk) 04:41, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

 Done--Shirt58 (talk) 12:52, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Fooling the IRS

I once heard that the IRS has an algorithm that catches tax cheats that just make up numbers off the top of their head when filling out tax forms. People tend to use the same numbers or combination of numbers apparently. I wonder if any one has ever used a random number generator or this book and just moved the decimal point to a suitable order of magnitude! I wonder if they can detect uncommon randomness too... whats the average entropy of the average Americans economic life? 75.170.64.238 (talk) 19:20, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

Actually doing this would likely alert the IRS. There have been studies which show that incomes follow Pareto distribution, basically a power rule x^a, a<0. The consequence of this is that its more likely for an income to start with the digit 1 than any other. If you were to take values straight out of the book you would end up too many values start with 9 which would be suspicious. Too much randomness is actually as likely as not enough.--Salix (talk): 23:35, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

More likely to be something similar to Benford's law --Rumping (talk) 23:59, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Checking the Digits

From memory, the introduction included something along the lines of : "A sample of pages has been fully proof-read, without error; the rest have just been looked at. One layout error was seen. It has been estimated that, of the possible electro-mechanical errors, about half would affect the value of a digit and about half would affect the layout. Therefore, of the one million random digits, probably one is incorrect." That seems worth including in the article, but as a direct quote of the original. 94.30.84.71 (talk) 15:48, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

I wonder if RAND ever published the code they used to generate the digits. If they did, and there's an OCR-ed copy of the book somewhere - or if someone could find one of the punch card sets, and somehow read them - it would be fascinating if someone could find the incorrect digit. Presumably this is a digit that was supposed to be e.g. 13425 but was accidentally printed as 13424. Then again, if the routine was truly random I assume it would be impossible to know which numbers were supposed to be published, short of carefully studying the original proofs and/or printing press for poorly-struck characters. 80.189.178.28 (talk) 10:16, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

The digits were generated from an analogue source, sampled, and digitised, according to the book's introduction. Circuit diagrams, however, are not included. The digits on the punch cards were then transformed further before publication.

As far as proofreading goes, page x reads: "These tables were reproduced by photo-offset from pages printed by the IBM model 856 Cardatype. Because of the very nature of the tables, it did not seem necessary to proofread every page of the final manuscript in order to catch random errors of the Cardatype. All pages were scanned for systematic errors, every twentieth page was proofread (starting with page 10 for both the digits and deviates), and every fortieth page (starting with page 5 for both the digits and deviates) was summed and the totals checked against sums obtained from the cards." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 125.239.157.198 (talk) 09:13, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

Copyright?

I just came here randomly while on a WikiWalk (hard to be quite serious about this subject – I initially titled this section "Random comment"). I just thought it's a cute coincidence that this book was published by an institution called RAND, despite that acronym having no connection to the word "random". The caption of the sample in the article is cute, too – one might wonder how the sample was chosen. :-)

On a more serious note, is there a copyright on the contents of the book? Or is the content inherently uncopyrightable? The description at rand.org does suggest it is copyrighted. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:57, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

At least here in Sweden it would be covered by a different intellectual protection, the database right.--Henke37 (talk) 23:42, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

External links modified

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Book is mentioned in a recent XKCD comic

Just letting anyone here who doesn't read XKCD know that this book is mentioned in a recent strip, so this page is going to get a lot of new traffic and possibly vandalism because of that. Tolstoyan at Heart (talk) 17:11, 30 October 2016 (UTC)

The particular strip, for anyone interested, is 1751: Movie Folder --StarChaser Tyger (talk) 08:20, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

So what the heck is a normal deviate?

What is a normal deviate, and why does the book include them, rather than another 200 pages of 'plain' random numbers? --StarChaser Tyger (talk) 08:20, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

In fact these are not just normal deviates, these are standard normal deviates, i.e. random numbers drawn from a normal distribution with expected value 0 and variance 1. The book includes them because generating values from normal distribution given random numbers drawn from a uniform distribution is not straightforward. Qwfp (talk) 19:43, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. Track your hook after promotion. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Beta Beta Beta (talk) 23:53, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

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Digits from A Million Random Digits

• ... that Jackson Mac Low used A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates (excerpt pictured) to write poetry?

• Source: Perlow, Seth (2015). "Reading By Chance: Jackson Mac Low and a Million Random Digits". Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. 42: 333–367. JSTOR 43908416. To compose each poem, Mac Low selected and rearranged words from a given Stein text [...] To perform many of the chance operations, Mac Low did not employ such familiar equipment as dice or a deck of cards. Instead he used a thick reference volume, A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates.

• • Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Chieko Hara

5x expanded by Generalissima (talk). Number of QPQs required: 1. Nominator has 158 past nominations.

Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 14:08, 2 August 2026 (UTC).

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy: Article is sourced, neutral, and free of copyright problems
Adequate sourcing: Neutral: Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:

Hook: Hook has been verified by provided inline citation
Cited: Interesting:

Image: Image is freely licensed, used in the article, and clear at 100px.
Freely licensed: Used in article: Clear at 100px:

QPQ: Done.

Overall: Epicgenius (talk) 18:05, 4 August 2026 (UTC)