A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates

RAND Corporation

A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates

New York City, USA: The Free Press, 1955

400 pp., 27.4 x 19.8 x 7.6 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

About twenty years ago, I curated an exhibition called Infinity Etc., at Mercer Union. The show featured works by Claude Closky, Martin Creed, Germaine Koh, Kelly Mark, Jonathan Monk, Daniel Olson, and Lee Ranaldo. 

I included this book by the RAND Corporation think-tank as a kind of curatorial readymade. Outside of the exhibition proper, it sat on a shelf alongside the guest book, for viewers to casually flip through before or after visiting the show. 

Unbeknownst me to me (until a few weeks ago), it had already been signed as a readymade artwork by James Lee Byars. 

The book is a collection of random figures and is considered an important 20th century work in the field of statistics and random numbers. Today, print-on-demand reprints sell for upwards of a hundred dollars (despite online number generators being commonplace). 

The project began as early as 1947 with an electronic simulation of a roulette wheel attached to a computer, the results of which were then carefully filtered and tested before being used to generate the table. In addition to being available in book form, one could also order the numbers on a series of punch cards.

Reportedly, when A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates was first indexed by New York Public Library it was erroneously listed under the heading of "Psychology."

"Early in the course of research at The RAND Corporation a demand arose for random numbers; these were needed to solve problems of various kinds by experimental probability procedures, which have come to be called Monte Carlo methods. Many of the applications required a large supply of random digits or normal deviates of high quality, and the tables presented here were produced to meet those requirements. 

[...]

The random digits in this book were produced by rerandomization of a basic table generated by an electronic roulette wheel. Briefly, a random frequency pulse source, providing on the average about 100,000 pulses per second, was gated about once per second by a constant frequency pulse. Pulse standardization circuits passed the pulses through a 5-place binary counter. In principle the machine was a 32-place roulette wheel which made, on the average, about 3000 revolutions per trial and produced one number per second. A binary-to-decimal converter was used which converted 20 of the 32 numbers (the other twelve were discarded) and retained only the final digit of two-digit numbers; this final digit was fed into an IBM punch to produce finally a punched card table of random digits."

- Introduction to the 2001 Reissue