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. “It’s this seminal 65-year-old piece that we all herald and revere,” says Mr. Briggs, an 11-year veteran of the Santa Monica, Calif., research organization, “so 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.

Source: Wall Street Journal September 24, 2020 15:51 UTC