Dar,

I'm afraid you are wrong…
they would not be 27 possibilities (3^3) but only 6 (3! - factorial), because 
each line (first, second and third) can only be present once.

And I tested random (3) and random (9999) corrected to give a number between 1 
and 3 with the following scripts:

on mouseUp
   put "" into fld "FR"
   repeat 100
      put random(3) & comma after fld "FR"
   end repeat
end mouseUp

result: 
1,3,2,3,1,1,1,3,3,3,3,2,1,2,2,2,1,2,2,3,1,3,2,3,2,2,3,2,2,3,3,2,2,3,1,3,1,3,2,2,1,3,2,1,3,3,2,3…
mean value: 1.992

on mouseUp
   put "" into fld "FR"
   put 0 into tt
   repeat 1000
      put random(9999) into tx
        switch
          case tx <= 3333
              put 1 into t
              break
          case tx <= 6666
              put 2 into t
              break
          default
              put 3 into t
        end switch
        add t to tt
    end repeat
    put tt/1000 into fld "Moyenne"
end mouseUp

result: 
1,2,3,3,1,3,2,3,3,2,3,2,3,3,2,2,1,1,3,3,2,2,2,1,3,1,3,3,3,3,1,1,3,2,3,1,2,1,1,1,2,1,3,2,3,2,2…
mean value: 1.992

so, it seems to be no statistical difference in the results ! No reason to use 
large numbers when not needed. (Ideally, the means should be 2, not 1.992, but 
well…)

Jacques


Le 23 mai 2013 à 01:23, Dar Scott <d...@swcp.com> a écrit :

> Here is (I think) the situation for random(3).
> 
> Lines will be (virtually) assigned numbers randomly; there are 27 
> possibilities.
> 
> There are 9 cases in which the first line is assigned a 1.  It is first in 
> the sort.
> There are 4 cases in which the first line is assigned a 2 and the other lines 
> get 2 or 3.  It is first in the sort
> There is one case in which all get a 3.  Again, the first line comes in first.
> 
> So, assuming my math is good, that means the first line comes in first 14 out 
> of 27 times.  That is 52% and should match what people are getting 
> empirically.  
> 
> This doesn't address broken random(), though.  It just emphasizes the 
> importance of the big number for random().
> 
> Dar
> 
> 
> On May 22, 2013, at 11:59 AM, Chris Sheffield wrote:
> 
>> I have a list of three words that I need to be randomly sorted. To start 
>> with, the first word is the correct answer to a question. I want to re-order 
>> the list so that the correct answer may be the second or third word, and not 
>> necessarily the first. How can I do this successfully every time? The docs 
>> give an example like this:
>> 
>>      sort lines of myVar by random(the number of lines of myVar)
>> 
>> But this only seems to work successfully one time. After that, the list is 
>> always set so the first word is the correct answer. So then I tried randomly 
>> setting the randomSeed value, since this value is supposed to affect the 
>> random() function and the any keyword, but this didn't seem to make much 
>> difference except to change it so either the second or third word is 
>> *always* the right answer. I need it to be more mixed up than that.
>> 
>> So does anyone have a good way to do this?
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Chris
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> Chris Sheffield
>> Read Naturally, Inc.
>> www.readnaturally.com
> 
> 
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