(This is a follow-up article to my post on generating random data that conforms to a given distribution; you might want to read it first.)
Here’s an interesting question I was pondering last week. The .NET base class library has a method Random.Next(int)
which gives you a pseudo-random integer greater than or equal to zero, and less than the argument. By contrast, the rand()
method in the standard C library returns a random integer between 0 and RAND_MAX
, which is usually 32768. A common technique for generating random numbers in a particular range is to use the remainder operator:
int value = rand() % range;
However, this almost always introduces some bias that causes the distribution to stop being uniform. Do you see why?
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