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Fairness: winners are selected using an unbiased Fisher-Yates shuffle. When supported, crypto-secure randomness (window.crypto) is used.
How can I pick a random winner from a list of names?
Run your draw with the free random name picker from Cogitans: paste one name per line, choose how many winners you need, then draw. A Fisher-Yates shuffle uses uniformly sampled random integers. The first entries in the shuffle are selected without reusing any line.
Examples and limitations
Enter Alice, Bilal, Chloe, David, Emma, Farid, Alice, Bilal on eight lines. Request three winners. With duplicate removal, six entries take part and three distinct names win. Without it, all eight lines participate, including two entries each for Alice and Bilal. The result changes on each draw. Duplicate removal merges people with identical names; add an identifier if they should remain separate.
Practical questions
How can I pick the winner of a competition?
Prepare the eligible participant list, then use the Cogitans random name picker to select the required number of winners. For one entry per person, check repeated entries and distinguish people with the same name before drawing. Copy the result to keep the selection; the tool does not check eligibility rules.
Do duplicate names affect the odds?
Yes. When duplicates are kept, each line participates. A repeated name has multiple entries and may appear more than once among the winners.
Can I import social media comments?
The tool accepts a pasted list. It does not connect to social networks to retrieve comments. Prepare the names before pasting them.
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