For 65 years, Rand Corp.’s reference book “A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates” has enjoyed a reputation as the go-to source for random numbers. Simulation and sampling problems are facilitated by these random numbers, as are many problems in our text. (See Table F.4 on page 799 of Module F, Simulation, for a small excerpt). As Gary Briggs of Rand Corp. noted in The Wall Street Journal (Sept. 25, 2020) “it was really hard to get really high-quality random numbers.”
Well, after all of these years and worldwide usage, Briggs found some errors. While many of us would consider the errors minor, he found them “soul crushing,” adding, “the idea that I’m finding errors that we’ve ignored for 65 years is upsetting.” Before modern computers, he says, “it was really hard to get high-quality random numbers.” The book changed that for a generation of pollsters, lottery administrators, market analysts and others who needed means of drawing random samples.
Here is a bit of history: Rand collected a million digits using Douglas Aircraft Co.’s machine that registered random fluctuations in voltage and converted them into strings of 1s and 0s. A circuit board converted sets of 1s and 0s into digits 0 to 9, which a third machine translated into holes punched into 20,000 computer cards. Technicians fed the cards into an IBM data-processing machine, which generated a million-digit number filling 400 pages of tables.
How did the digits lose their “randomness?” Briggs thinks a technician dropped cards and put them back in the wrong order!
“A Million Random Digits,” by the way, became less relevant as powerful computers generated instant randomness.
Classroom discussion questions:
- How much difference would such errors in the Rand book make in your problems in Module F?
- Why are random numbers an important tool?