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Comment by spiffytech | Hacker News Reader

It amused me that my college statistics textbook had an appendix of random numbers in the back of the book. Just a long list of numbers generated at random and then immortalized on the same medium as ancient texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I guess that's the best we had for students before the widespread adoption of computers?

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My joke is that the random numbers is the most informative section of the book -- because it is, in the Shannon sense! But not in the colloquial sense, of course.

Back in the day, uniform random variates weren't that hard to come by, but if you wanted to simulate some normals, unless you wanted to do double table lookup plus maybe some interpolation, those tables were as convenient as it got.

You say that, but generating uniform variates was itself a whole trick. Famously RAND put a lot of effort into creating a ton of them and publishing them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Million_Random_Digits_with_1...

The RAND corporation published a book filled with just random digits.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1418.html

Hilariously, there’s an Errata available.

I revisited this in 2020 and found some additional things, separate from that errata. All my code is available here: https://github.com/RANDCorporation/milliondigits

And there's a news article about it here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/rand-million-random-digits-numb...

Guess it’s only fitting.

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