On Wed, 14 Nov 2007, Mark Mielke wrote:
The other problem with using modulo is that it makes the result depend mostly on the low-order bits of the random() result, rather than mostly on the high-order bits; with lower-grade implementations of random(), the lower bits are materially less random than the higher.
If this was a serious problem, there is the >> operator. I see it as a poor coding practice to make assumptions about which bits are most "random" in a call to random().
There are many types of pseudo-random number generators where the low-order bits are not so random, and the assumption Tom has described is pretty likely to be true. See http://www.fourmilab.ch/random/ as one comment about the badness of the standard UNIX random generator for example.
There is an interesting discussion of this issue along with code showing a way to improve things while only using integer math (which in some cases uses >> as you suggest) as part of the Java standard library:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/util/Random.html#nextInt(int) -- * Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly
