On Tue, Oct 03, 2023 at 03:08:03PM +0000, Zelphir Kaltstahl wrote: > Hello Guile Users, > > today I want to verify some understanding I have about generating random > numbers using Guile.
[...] > Some time ago, I wanted to generate uniformly distributed floats though. Wait a minute: you want uniformly distributed floats (in an interval, I assume)? > There seems to be no facility in Guile to do that. So I took a look at > Wikipedia: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution#Computational_methods: > > > An easy-to-program approximate approach that relies on the central limit > theorem is as follows [...] What you get here is (an approximation to) a *normal* distribution, which is something totally different (you actually use N (== 12 in your example) *uniform* distributions to build that) [...] > Aha! They need to be "independent" too! Not only uniformly distributed! > Might be my code would be working wrong, if I do not pay attention to > statistical traps. If your random number generator is "good enough", consequent values are expected (heh) to be (statistically [1]) independent. So I wouldn't bother too much about it. On the contrary -- perhaps this mode is better tested than using twelve "parallel" PRNGs as you plan. Cheers [1] Yeah, deep philosophical rabbit holes everywhere. I mean it in some robust, practical way. -- t
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