Can you get the same random numbers back?
A random result nobody can regenerate is a number you cannot defend. Put a seed in the box and the same draw comes back, on any machine, forever: the draw becomes an address rather than an event.
Words on this sheet
- Standard deviation: How far a typical reading sits from the average, in the same units as the readings.
- Distribution: The shape of the uncertainty in a number: which values it can take and how likely each one is.
- Seed: The starting number for the random draws. The same seed gives the same draws every time.
- Mean: The average: everything added up and divided by how many there are.
Analytics Starter Random Number Generation free
After you install, this is the model to open.
Reproducible Random Draws, With a Seed
- In your spreadsheet, click the Sortia icon in the strip of icons down the right-hand edge. No strip? Click the arrow at the bottom-right to open it. You can also use Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia.
- Click Start from a template and put that name in the search box.
- Pick the card with that name and click Load this template. It arrives on a new tab with real numbers already in it.
The answer
What this seed produces, and what it produces on the second run:
- Values drawn
- 400 two columns of 200
- Average
- -0.10 spanning -3.26 to 2.87
- Run it again
- identical same order, same decimals
- Change the seed
- new draw -2.86 to 2.92 at 20260825
The seed does not make the numbers less random. It makes them addressable: a colleague on another machine gets your exact figures, a change in the answer can only have come from the model, and the run behind a number can be reproduced rather than resembled. Clear the box and every press gives a fresh draw. One thing this does not do is correlate the columns: two variables from one run are independent by construction, and inputs that need to move together belong in the Risk panel, where correlation is a setting.
The model
Two hundred normal values in each of two variables, drawn with a seed. The parameter fields change with the distribution, because each of the seven shapes asks for what it needs.
| Distribution | Normal, mean 0, standard deviation 1 |
| Values per variable | 200 |
| Variables | 2 |
| Seed | 20260824 |
| Values written | calculated |
Once it is in your sheet
- The model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second.
- Change the numbers to yours. The sheet marks which cells are inputs and which hold formulas, and most labels carry a note explaining the row.
- Press the run button at the bottom of the panel. It is labeled for the tool you are in, and the result lands on its own tab, with a written reading of it beside the figures.
Never used Google Sheets? Start here goes the whole way, in seven steps, and assumes nothing.
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