This is similar in some respect to the algorithm I posted, but seems to touch each number several times, adding a little bit of the remainder. I think that will tend to be somewhat slower than my algorithm, though it turns out to be stable without modification in the case where constraints are all 50 +/- 50.

In some benchmarks I ran -- on slightly cleaned up version of my algorithm, admittedly, and incorporating the fix for pathological remainders -- I saw about a 10% gain over gen3 for the initial case of constraints. The difference was only about 5% for the pathological constraints case. (The original "gen" was substantially faster than both.)

So, Grandfather -- you've got a couple of workable options now. In the benchmarking, all three algorithms were run several hundred thousand times (and checked against constraints each time). I'd suggesting trying them out and confirming the statistical properties of the numbers you get in case either of us introduced some bias unintentionally.

-xdg

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In reply to Re^2: Need technique for generating constrained random data sets by xdg
in thread Need technique for generating constrained random data sets by GrandFather

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