Happy new year nuns and monks!

I know random numbers is a vaste field. I know CPAN contains valid true random generator modules (as suggested in rand manpage). But I dont wont to do a cryptographically secure application.

I just want to be sure that if I use rand to simulate a six sided die and I repaet the roll 10000 times I will get an average result of 3.5 as expected.

Of course this is easy to prove and I get what I expected:

my $res; $res += 1+int( rand(6) ) for 1..10000; print qq(average: ), $res/10000; # average: 3.501

But the case is I want to put this inside a .t file of a module and I'm roughly expecting an average greater than 3.4 and lesser than 3.6:

my $tenk; $tenk += 1+int( rand(6) ) for 1..10000; ok ( $tenk/10000 > 3.4, "average randomness ok (10000d6 / 10000 > 3.4) +" ); ok ( $tenk/10000 < 3.6, "average randomness ok (10000d6 / 10000 < 3.6) +" );

While the above seems to be ok on my platform, can I expect the same result on every platform? and for every perl version around the world? Should I repeat the check 100 times to have an average of averages?

Thanks for reading

L*

There are no rules, there are no thumbs..
Reinvent the wheel, then learn The Wheel; may be one day you reinvent one of THE WHEELS.

In reply to is rand random enough to simulate dice rolls? by Discipulus

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