The problem with your approach is that not only the chances of misses rises as you have selected more items — it is not even garanteed to ever finish;

Unless there's a bug in the implementation, the approach will finish. In fact, it's bounded by O(N2). Each iteration will find a new number - if the initial guess hit an already picked number, a scan for an unpicked number is made. And until all numbers have been picked, a scan will find an unpicked number.

Now, the approach won't be fair (due to clustering), and it won't be fast (quadratic vs. linear), and the implementation might contain bugs (and is huge for such a simple problem), the algorithm will finish (the implementation might not).

In reply to Re^2: Generating 0 .. N Randomly and Efficiently by Anonymous Monk
in thread Generating 0 .. N Randomly and Efficiently by Limbic~Region

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.