Is this the best book ever written?
Odd, bizarre, unexpected and yet brilliantly practical with a significant impact on the real world. You never know what is going to happen next, with all sorts of twists and turns along the way. I defy anyone to predict how it will end.
Oh, you want to know the title?
Why, it’s A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates, produced by the RAND Corporation of course.
At the time of publication in 1955 finding genuinely random sets of numbers to use for purposes as varied as statistics, lottery administration and even (so maritime lore has it) plotting submarine evasion courses was quite a problem. Hence this publication which is both more useful and less alarming that a certain other publication from the 1950s and rather safer to use than another title I could mention, but also with a title rather less interesting than a certain book about poultry.
UPDATE: My Amazon review of this book has now hit the big time.
I like that Amazon lets you 'look inside': so you can check it's truly random, presumably?
It's still a problem to find 'genuinely random sets of numbers' (one could argue such sets are literally impossibly to find) so that's why pople use 'pseudorandom numbers'. Numbers that for all purposes are random. The reason we don't need such a book is that we have so many numbers (the fourth decimal of the current time in seconds etc.) that fulfill the same purpose.
Customers who view this also viewed a 24 pack of Irn Bru and the DVD of The ultimate Bourne collection. The mind boggles in the extreme!