while neither a normal distribution nor integer based, the following is relatively fast and may be useful for you (you might need to slide things around so that you get the maximum value where you want it and ignore the rest)
check out the poisson distribution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution there is helpfully an algorithm from knuth around the middle of the article that is quick. i take it that you want to go from a uniform distribution to something weighted more on one side than the other, for a finite number of possible values? if there's no strong reason that you want it to be "half-normal", then there are a ton of distributions that can serve that need and might be easier to deal with in code. i suggested the poisson because it's something like the binomial, which itself is quite a bit like the normal, only very heavily based in a finite number of trials. (i'd prefer the binomial, but that might mean precomputing a lot of little tables ahead of time). s. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
