In The Club
Pick competition winners at random
Run a club or society? Here's how your tech can make it easier
P
rinting names and picking them out of a hat is one way to decide club competition winners, but there are slicker and more entertaining methods you can use.
Use Random.org’s True Random Number Generator
The simplest way to pick a winner is to get a random number from Random.org, which launched way back in 1998 (just a few months after Computeractive).
Built by Dr Mads Haahr of the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College, Dublin, it picks up signals from radio receivers or antennas, and electromagnetic noise from the atmosphere, such as that generated by lightning or solar activity. This “atmospheric noise” is used to randomise numbers. Dr Haahr says this is true randomness, unlike “pseudorandom” algorithms used by software.