From: "Olaf Klischat said:
See? One number per 200-numbers interval. Every time[1]. This hints at
a wrong implementation.
I used the same approach. I wasn't sure if it was legal
or not. But it was sure easy...
This is off-point for this particular post, and I apologize for not
reading/remembering the original challenge, but when someone commented about
it seeming odd that there were so many numbers prefixed, iirc, with something
like 999999.., I got to thinking--the odd thing about this challenge is
sorting the numbers. I don't think many of us are used to looking at a
sorted list of random numbers and trying to judge whether they are random (if
that's possible).
Two examples:
If you took 5 random numbers from in the interval 0..10, you might see
something like this: 9, 3, 2, 6,4--"looks" fairly random. Now sort that
list: 2, 3, 4, 6, 9--"looks" a lot less random.
For even more fun, do it for a series of coin flips (with H for heads, T for
tails, (and E for edge ;-))--you might get a sequence (for 6 flips) like H,
T, T, H, T, H. Now sort that list: H, H, H, T, T, T--doesn't look very
random at all.
regards,
Randy Kramer
PS: Just for the record, if someone implemented a simplified approach which
took a random number on each interval of 200 numbers in the original range, I
would have to say that was the wrong approach (or, maybe more accurately, I
would hope that I had specified the problem well enough so that such was not
an acceptable approach).
