Ok, let's risk losing you all with a definition: What is a random number generator? It is a computational or physical device designed to generate a sequence of numbers or symbols that lack any pattern, i.e. appear random. Now that wasn't too hard was it?

Before computers, and all the way back to ancient times, numbers (or letters, or anything) could be made to appear random by rolling dice, flipping coins, shuffling playing cards, pulling counters from a bag, o drawing sticks. With the advent of computers, programmes can be run to generate numbers (or anything else) at random. Remember when the first "shuffle-play" CD players came in? And before that there were even crude random play options on some early Juke Boxes.

You can buy a commercial bingo Game blower for about £1000, but there are electronic cheaper alternatives at 10% of the price, although less visually striking!

If you are really fascinated by all things random, there's a site you may be interested in that has a computer random generator number you can use on the main page. http://www.random.org/  There are also many other sites that will offer you simple programs for generating numbers between 1 and 90 inclusive. But I guess it's only the one online or at your Bingo Hall that's important and may make the difference between a win or not!

While there are heavy intellectual arguments about just how random a computerised random number generator can be when it has been programmed by a human, for you and I, as punters, players or callers, there's no way we could predict what the next number to be called coming out might be. Only another computer, programmed with the same programme as the original, and then having to spend time getting to know the sequences and nuances of the first computer!

Of course the old pulling numbers out from a bag to play Bingo is susceptible to human manipulation. My parents had a game of Housey-Housey with 90 round wooden counters with the numbers 1-90 on them. From repeated plays, I knew that the back of one of them (71, as I recall) had a chip out of it, and therefore if I had the time and patience, I could have sifted the numbers until I found that one. Why bother? I didn't know what numbers my relatives and friends had on their Bingo cards, so it would have had no effect on play!

Well I'm going to pick out a random tea-bag from my tea-bag jar, and make a cuppa! Good Luck!