New submission from Ram Rachum <r...@rachum.com>:
I was recently tripped up by a bug caused by passing infinite weights to random.choices. I toyed around with that function, and it seemed that when it's given weights that include infinity or NaN, it selects a specific element, always without being random. That's regardless of whether multiple items have infinity weights. It chooses a different specific item if the infinity is negative. The specific item isn't always the one that has the infinite weight. I don't know whether that's the intended behavior for some reason, or whether it's even possible to define a logical behavior for infinite weights. If it's not possible, then maybe this function should raise an errors when given weights that include infinity or nan. I see that the documentation states that the weights must be non-negative; maybe we should have a check for that too. ---------- components: Library (Lib) messages: 376802 nosy: cool-RR priority: normal severity: normal status: open title: Clarify handling of infinity and nan in random.choices type: behavior versions: Python 3.10 _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <https://bugs.python.org/issue41773> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
