in reply to How much random is rand()?

If I'm reading this correctly, you want the numbers 0-32 in a random order? If so, what you have is not the way to go. What you want to do is shuffle; otherwise, as you've seen, you could go on forever and not complete.

-derby

Update: There are some good replies below but I'm I the only one having a problem with

while(1) { $rand = int(rand(32)); ... }
while the comments about 4 never getting into the list if 14 is all ready in the list are valid ... there's also the quite real possiblity of 4 never being returned from rand! Or at the very least you may get a large number of duplicate 14s before you ever get the chance to grep (validly) for 4. Shuffling is definitely what you want if what you want is 0-32 in a random order.

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Re^2: How much random is rand()?
by almut (Canon) on Jan 19, 2009 at 23:44 UTC
    ... there's also the quite real possiblity of 4 never being returned from rand!

    In that case, the pseudo random number generator would be broken (taking 'never' literally). In theory, it might occasionally take a 'long time' for any certain number to occur, but that's unlikely in practice.

    Actually, presuming a statistically equal distribution of values returned by the PRNG, the probability to get a certain (integer) number is expected to be 1/N (N being 32 in this case).  So, even on the last turn, when all but one of the 32 values are already taken, the chance to get the final remaining number is 1/32 (or 32 attempts, on average); when there are still two numbers left, the chance is 2/32 (16 attempts), etc.

    Doing some simple simulation statistics confirms this quite well (although slightly modified in implementation, the central algorithm is functionally the same as that of the OP):

    #!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; my $n = 1e4; # number of runs for the statistics my $N = 32; my @sum; my @max = (0)x($N+1); for (1..$n) { my @have_num = (); for my $i (1..$N) { my $attempts = 0; while(1) { my $rand = int(rand($N)); #print "."; $attempts++; unless ($have_num[$rand]) { #print " $i: $rand\n"; $have_num[$rand] = 1; last; } } $sum[$i] += $attempts; $max[$i] = $attempts if $attempts > $max[$i]; } } for my $i (1..$N) { my $avg = $sum[$i]/$n; my $bar = "*" x int($avg+0.5); printf "%2d: %6.3f [%6.3f] %s max=%d\n", $i, $avg, $N/($N-$i+1), $bar, $max[$i]; } __END__ 1: 1.000 [ 1.000] * max=1 2: 1.033 [ 1.032] * max=4 3: 1.065 [ 1.067] * max=4 4: 1.104 [ 1.103] * max=5 5: 1.142 [ 1.143] * max=7 6: 1.186 [ 1.185] * max=7 7: 1.230 [ 1.231] * max=8 8: 1.283 [ 1.280] * max=8 9: 1.334 [ 1.333] * max=8 10: 1.392 [ 1.391] * max=10 11: 1.453 [ 1.455] * max=10 12: 1.521 [ 1.524] ** max=11 13: 1.601 [ 1.600] ** max=13 14: 1.684 [ 1.684] ** max=13 15: 1.779 [ 1.778] ** max=14 16: 1.882 [ 1.882] ** max=16 17: 1.999 [ 2.000] ** max=19 18: 2.137 [ 2.133] ** max=17 19: 2.283 [ 2.286] ** max=23 20: 2.462 [ 2.462] ** max=20 21: 2.674 [ 2.667] *** max=26 22: 2.904 [ 2.909] *** max=29 23: 3.198 [ 3.200] *** max=31 24: 3.551 [ 3.556] **** max=37 25: 3.996 [ 4.000] **** max=48 26: 4.554 [ 4.571] ***** max=47 27: 5.331 [ 5.333] ***** max=55 28: 6.400 [ 6.400] ****** max=79 29: 8.026 [ 8.000] ******** max=95 30: 10.597 [10.667] *********** max=140 31: 15.983 [16.000] **************** max=211 32: 32.092 [32.000] ******************************** max=343

    The second column is the number of attempts, averaged over 10000 runs in this case (a single run doing what the OP's code did). The values in brackets are the corresponding expected values. "max=" is the worst case number of attempts that ever occurred.

Re^2: How much random is rand()?
by FunkyMonk (Bishop) on Jan 19, 2009 at 23:48 UTC
    $rand = int(rand(32));
    That'll never return 32.

    rand says:

    Returns a random fractional number greater than or equal to 0 and less than the value of EXPR.
    For random integers between 0 and 32 use int rand 33

    BUT, as others have suggested, shuffle is the way to go