It was produced starting in 1947 by 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 digits on a series of punched cards.

[1][2][3] The main use of the tables was in statistics and the experimental design of scientific experiments, especially those that used the Monte Carlo method; in cryptography, they have also been used as nothing up my sleeve numbers, for example in the design of the Khafre cipher.

The book was one of the last of a series of random number tables produced from the mid-1920s to the 1950s, after which the development of high-speed computers allowed faster operation through the generation of pseudorandom numbers rather than reading them from tables.

The book was reissued in 2001 (ISBN 0-8330-3047-7) with a new foreword by RAND Executive Vice President Michael D. Rich.