Chris, I think Randy has put his finger on something: the * is before any 
number or letter in the ASCII numeration. I do not know what the random 
function uses when randomizing a "set" (I was not even aware of this 
possibility) but that could well be the ASCII value(s) of the first char(s). 

Jacques

Le 23 mai 2013 à 02:36, Randy Hengst <iowahen...@mac.com> a écrit :

> Well Chris, I'm sure you've already tried this, but when this kind of thing 
> happens to me… in other words, when a script is correct, but the results are 
> wrong… I've messed something up later in the script with another put 
> statement that overrides it. Maybe the place in the script where you've 
> removed the *
> 
> My debugging skills are not top notch… So, I'd brute force things and put an 
> "answer tPossibleAnswers" after each line to see what is happening… and again 
> at the end of the handler.
> 
> I'd be interested in what you discover.
> 
> be well,
> randy
> -----
> On May 22, 2013, at 4:34 PM, Chris Sheffield wrote:
> 
>> Thanks for the suggestions everyone, but I'm still getting strange results, 
>> and I'm beginning to think there's something I'm doing that's affecting use 
>> of the random() function. Not really sure what it would be though. Here's my 
>> code:
>> 
>> set the itemDel to tab
>> put "*" & item 3 of sRecSet into tPossibleAnswers -- correct answer
>> put cr & item 4 of sRecSet after tPossibleAnswers -- distractor 1
>> put cr & item 5 of sRecSet after tPossibleAnswers -- distractor 2
>> sort lines of tPossibleAnswers by random(999999) -- randomly re-order the 
>> list
>> 
>> This app pulls words from a database and presents three possible answers to 
>> choose from. The asterisk above is used to identify the correct answer after 
>> the sort takes place. It's removed later on. The sort only works randomly 
>> one time. After that, the same sort order is used every time, so the correct 
>> answer *always* ends up listed first. It doesn't matter if I use a very high 
>> number or if I use 'the number of lines of tPossibleAnswers'. Something is 
>> very strange. Just as a quick test, I added a button to the card with this 
>> inside:
>> 
>> put "one" & cr & "two" & cr & "three" into tLines
>> sort lines of tLines by random(the number of lines of tLines)
>> answer tLines
>> 
>> This seems to work just fine. Yes, it does mean getting the same order 
>> sometimes twice or maybe even three times in a row, but not usually more 
>> than that, which would be fine in this case. So I'm not sure what's going on 
>> with my actual code. I'm no longer setting the randomSeed or anything like 
>> that.
>> 
>> The other strange thing is no matter what I try, if I use the random() 
>> function or the any keyword in anyway, I get similar results. Something is 
>> affecting the "randomness". This is for an iOS app, btw, if that makes any 
>> difference to anyone. This might be kind of a dumb thing to do, but the only 
>> other thing I can think of would be to add several more lines of data to the 
>> three actual possible answers, then sort the whole thing, then somehow 
>> filter out everything I added before the sort. With more lines, maybe I'd 
>> get better results?
>> 
>> Thanks again,
>> Chris
>> 
>> On May 22, 2013, at 3:03 PM, Dar Scott <d...@swcp.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> I think you are going to get the first line of the original list (correct 
>>> answer) about half the time.  Does that seem right to you from what you 
>>> have seen?  The correct answer will be in the first two about 80% of the 
>>> time.  
>>> 
>>> Using the larger argument for random should give you better proportions.  
>>> You should get it in the first line a third of the time.  
>>> 
>>> If you only interested in the first line, there might be some methods that 
>>> are clearer and more fun.
>>> 
>>> 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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