I suspect you've misunderstood the 'popular' algorithm: 550 is the sum of the votes, so if (for example) the hash is traversed in order of decreasing popularity, rolling 0..99 will give alligator, 100..179 will give bear, etc., until 540..549 gives jellyfish. As far as I know this is pretty much the standard approach (up to optimizations) for picking from a set with weights.

In reply to Re^2: Randomly choosing from a set of alternatives with varying popularity by hv
in thread Randomly choosing from a set of alternatives with varying popularity by ibm1620

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