in reply to RE: Re: Random Numbers
in thread Random Numbers

um you know actually i think your right ... it should be rand(10)%10 and i should have used srand to seed the rand function. But when it comes down to it in most cases what i find is that random enough numbers are enough. And its pretty impossible to get a "truely" random number from a computer. So I dont press the point. I could see however in cases where say you were doing some sort of research to select subjects at random to fill a number of cells. In that case you would want a better random algorhythm, but in most cases ... its really ok to just have a random enough number.

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RE: RE: RE: Re: Random Numbers
by turnstep (Parson) on Apr 10, 2000 at 17:41 UTC

    | And its pretty impossible to get a "truely" random
    | number from a computer

    Actually, it is quite possible to do so and it is done quite frequently. A popular way is from timing events, such as a user's input into the keyboard. (It's generating the seed that is a real issue.) Using good old unreliable human input works quite nicely :).

    Point taken that it is good enough for this example (as long as srand is used, of course!)

      A popular way is from timing events, such as a user's input into the keyboard. (It's generating the seed that is a real issue.) Using good old unreliable human input works quite nicely :)

      That reminds me of some Javascript I wrote nearly 30 years ago.

      I wanted to display one of 3 images randomly. So, the image was dependent on when the script loaded. 0-19 seconds past the minute for one image, 20-39 seconds for the next, etc.

      On the same site, we had a gallery of nearly 100 (probably uncompressed) images - how slow must that have been on 33k dialup!!! Because I figured people wouldn't scroll to the bottom, I arranged that every hour the bottom image got moved to the top to ring the changes.