Peter Chant <pet...@mpeteozilla.vco.uke> writes: > I remeber being told that adding up 12 random numbers in the range 0-1 > (which is what most computer random number genertors at the time chucked > out) and subtracted 6 gives a pretty good normal distribution. I think I > did try it once and it failed, but I must have done something odd.
That gives you a binomial distribution on 12 trials, which approximates a normal distribution when the number of trials is large. 12 isn't too bad. But there's a simpler way, the Box-Muller transform, that gives you a pair drawn from a precisely normal distribution from two uniform random samples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-Muller_transform -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
