Wednesday, October 7, 2020

Sleuth Finds Flaw in RAND Corp.'s "A Million Random Digits"

Here is an excerpt from The Wall Street Journal:

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.

Until, on a random whim, Gary Briggs came along and ruined it all.

Mr. Briggs, a Rand software engineer, spent his spring rifling through the million digits and discovered that while the numbers inside are indeed quite random, the venerated book is not quite right.

RAND was founded in 1948 and is headquartered in Santa Monica, California.