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A comment on A Brief History of Random Numbers.

Re:A Brief History of Random Numbers by spiffytech on Thursday February 16, 2023 @07:12PM (#34828734)
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 could ask of students before widespread adoption of computers?

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Re:A Brief History of Random Numbers by waldrews on Thursday February 16, 2023 @07:37PM (#34828986)
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.
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Re:A Brief History of Random Numbers by artisanscribble on Friday February 17, 2023 @08:22AM (#34834323)
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...

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Re:A Brief History of Random Numbers by NegativeK on Thursday February 16, 2023 @09:11PM (#34829804)
The RAND corporation published a book filled with just random digits.

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

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Re:A Brief History of Random Numbers by layer8 on Thursday February 16, 2023 @10:15PM (#34830264)
Hilariously, there’s an Errata available.
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Re:A Brief History of Random Numbers by chunkyks on Friday February 17, 2023 @03:26AM (#34832234)
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...

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Re:A Brief History of Random Numbers by saagarjha on Friday February 17, 2023 @02:02AM (#34831698)
Guess it’s only fitting.
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Re:A Brief History of Random Numbers by kqr on Friday February 17, 2023 @06:26AM (#34833398)
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.
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