This doesn't speak to your problem, but FWIW there's a neat way to equally select at random from an array, as you seem to be doing:

c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -MData::Dump -le
"my @ra = qw(x y z);
 printf '%s ', $ra[ rand @ra ] for 1 .. 20;
 print '';
 ;;
 my %h;
 $h{ $ra[ rand @ra ] }++ for 1 .. 1_000_000;
 dd \%h;
"
y y y x x z y y z z z y x z x y x y y x
{ "x" => 333660, "y" => 332908, z => 333432 }
[download]

(Of course, the rand built-in isn't all that random, but that's another tale for another thread.)