From: Matthew Moss <matthew.moss.coder@...>
Date: 2006-01-25T01:28:21+09:00
Subject: Re: problems with standard rand functions

hist = Hash.new(0)
1_000_000.times do |i|
    hist[rand(6)] += 1
end

print hist.map { |k,v| "#{k}:#{v}\n" }.sort.join


My output:

0:166636
1:166867
2:166866
3:166923
4:166572
5:166136

Seems pretty uniform to me...
As I recall (and someone else might know better), Ruby uses the
Mersenne Twister which is pretty darn random. I haven't seen the Ruby
source to know how they're presenting it (ie, how they map to a range
of 0-5, for instance)