Categories:
.NET (357)
C (330)
C++ (183)
CSS (84)
DBA (2)
General (7)
HTML (4)
Java (574)
JavaScript (106)
JSP (66)
Oracle (114)
Perl (46)
Perl (1)
PHP (1)
PL/SQL (1)
RSS (51)
Software QA (13)
SQL Server (1)
Windows (1)
XHTML (173)
Other Resources:
How can I get random integers in a certain range?
How can I get random integers in a certain range?
✍: Guest
The obvious way,
rand() % N /* POOR */
(which tries to return numbers from 0 to N-1) is poor, because the low-order bits of many random number generators are distressingly non-random.
A better method is something like
(int)((double)rand() / ((double)RAND_MAX + 1) * N)
If you'd rather not use floating point, another method is
rand() / (RAND_MAX / N + 1)
If you just need to do something with probability 1/N, you could use
if(rand() < (RAND_MAX+1u) / N)
All these methods obviously require knowing RAND_MAX (which ANSI #defines in <stdlib.h>), and assume that N is much less than RAND_MAX.
When N is close to RAND_MAX, and if the range of the random number generator is not a multiple of N (i.e. if (RAND_MAX+1) % N != 0), all of these methods break down: some outputs occur more often than others. (Using floating point does not help; the problem is that rand returns RAND_MAX+1 distinct values, which cannot always be evenly divvied up into N buckets.) If this is a problem, about the only thing you can do is to call rand multiple times, discarding certain values:
unsigned int x = (RAND_MAX + 1u) / N;
unsigned int y = x * N;
unsigned int r;
do {
r = rand();
} while(r >= y);
return r / x;
For any of these techniques, it's straightforward to shift the range, if necessary; numbers in the range [M, N] could be generated with something like
M + rand() / (RAND_MAX / (N - M + 1) + 1)
(Note, by the way, that RAND_MAX is a constant telling you what the fixed range of the C library rand function is. You cannot set RAND_MAX to some other value, and there is no way of requesting that rand return numbers in some other range.)
If you're starting with a random number generator which returns floating-point values between 0 and 1 , all you have to do to get integers from 0 to N-1 is multiply the output of that generator by N:
(int)(drand48() * N)
2015-07-29, 1425👍, 0💬
Popular Posts:
What Tools to Use to View HTML Documents? The basic tool you need to view HTML documents is any Web ...
Can you please post OpenLink Endur related FAQ's,tutorials,document s.Thanks
How To Download and install PSP Evaluation? - PSP Tutorials - Fading Images to Background Colors wit...
Can you explain steps in function points? Below are the steps in function points: >First Count ILF, ...
Where are cookies actually stored on the hard disk? This depends on the user's browser and OS. In th...