From: "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@...>
Date: 2003-04-19T08:12:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Biased weighted random?

----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Pine" <nemo@hellotree.com>
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2003 5:52 PM
Subject: Re: Biased weighted random?


> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@hypermetrics.com>
>
> 1. Are you sure you want to call Daniel's method
> the bonehead algorithm? :)
> ----------------------------
>
> See, now I feel bad about that.  :(

Ha, don't take it seriously. I'm just kidding,
we all knew what you meant.

> The second was trickier (the thing I did 50 times).  Mauricio claimed to
> have solved that part (and I've never seen him make a mathematical
mistake),
> but I didn't check it myself.  It was too much to do at my computer, and I
> had no paper around.  Even so, it looked like he was trying to give you a
> transition matrix, but I really think that, in order to by psychologically
> satisfying, or as "locally random" as possible, or however you want to say
> it, you need to get a weighting and then just run it through the
> aforementioned, poorly named, "bonehead" algorithm.

Well, regardless of how you get it... it works well.

By that I mean, I took the "adjusted" weights [5406,2475,1453,665]
(I like integers) and ran them through the bonehead method... and
got out a perfect set of results (well, as perfect as PRNGs ever
are).

My resulting frequencies were 40%,30%,20%,10%.

So for that case it works beautifully.

Anyway, on to other things.

Thanks much!

Hal