in reply to Randomly biased, random numbers.

I wanted an "aesthetic" distribution of points over a plane, so I wrote Random::PoissonDisc. This module tries to distribute points "equally" across a plane with a minimum distance between each other.

At the release time of the module, I wrote a blog post on Random::PoissonDisc which has graphics showing the distribution differences of "white noise" random and the "blue noise" random that Random::PoissonDisc produces.

If the distribution properties of Random::PoissonDisc match your requirements, you will likely want to reimplement the module using PDL if you want better performance. The paper which outlines the algorithm is also linked from the module documentation.

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Re^2: Randomly biased, random numbers.
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Dec 06, 2013 at 08:47 UTC

    Actually, that seems to be almost the antithesis of what I'm after. It seeks to restrain the randomness to a regular(ish) grid pattern. My problem is that randomly picking points in the plane is too uniform.

    I want clumps, but I want them at a larger scale than they form naturally from purely random distribution.

    However, the article you linked, linked an article that linked an article on (something possible or possibly not) called "Perlin Noise" which, whatever it is called, looks like it could be just what I need ... Thanks for the lead.

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