Re^2: Where is the zero coming from?

I believe that this is the only suggestion which correctly simulates picking six balls without putting each ball back in the box before drawing the next ball. (Most lotteries keep the balls out and display all six of them.)

Bill

Comment on Re^2: Where is the zero coming from?

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Re^3: Where is the zero coming from? by AnomalousMonk (Archbishop) on Aug 03, 2014 at 10:09 UTC
Although I haven't tested it, I think CountZero's approach avoids dupes: splice removes each spliced element from the `@choices` source array before the next pick. I like CountZero's approach better because it's simple, doesn't depend on a module, and seems like it would scale well to very large arrays. The only drawback I see is that the source array is mutated. However, I believe there is a large literature base on 'fair' picking, so there's probably an even better solution!	[reply] [d/l]

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Re^3: Where is the zero coming from?
by AnomalousMonk (Archbishop) on Aug 03, 2014 at 10:09 UTC

Although I haven't tested it, I think CountZero's approach avoids dupes: splice removes each spliced element from the @choices source array before the next pick. I like CountZero's approach better because it's simple, doesn't depend on a module, and seems like it would scale well to very large arrays. The only drawback I see is that the source array is mutated. However, I believe there is a large literature base on 'fair' picking, so there's probably an even better solution!

[reply]
[d/l]