For example, suppose we have a 1 cm diameter steel bar and wish to cut it into 20 cm pieces from which we will ultimately make tension test specimens. The correct procedure is if we will cut all of the 16 specimens at the same time and identify each with numbers 1 through to 16, indicating their position within the original bar. We should then use random numbers to select the four specimens to be tested. We may use random numbers uniformly distributed over 00 - 99 tables as you can find at the end of this chapter.
Computer programs are readily available for random number formations.
We may start at a random location in an appropriate random number table and reject the random numbers until we encounter a number from 1 to 16, say 9. Assume that we subsequently encounter the number 3, then 15, then 1.