Re: Rand() with ?log10? distribution?

It won't be exactly a log 10 distribution, but rand()**2 * $max would probably be close to what you're looking for.

For example:

$rand_max = 1025;
sub my_rand{
  $rnd = rand;
  return int($rnd*$rnd * $rand_max);
}

@a = ();
for(1..100000) {
  $n = my_rand();
  $a[$n]++;
}

$i = 1;
while($i <= 1024) {
  print "$i: ", $a[$i], $/;
  $i = $i*2;
}
[download]

will produce a distribution similar to this:

1: 1338
2: 913
4: 718
8: 526
16: 397
32: 280
64: 195
128: 137
256: 99
512: 65
1024: 42
[download]

If the curve is too steep (or not steep enough), you can adjust the exponent to 1.5, or 2.5 etc., instead of 2.

Comment on Re: Rand() with ?log10? distribution? Select or Download Code

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Re^2: Rand() with ?log10? distribution?
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Jun 07, 2013 at 05:47 UTC

We have a winner! sub primo2{ int( rand() ** 4 * $_[0] ) } Thanks.

I came up with a few of my own:

sub   xx2{ int(   2**(   2**( rand() * logN( $_[0],   2 ) ) ) ) }
sub  xx10{ int(  10**(  10**( rand() * logN( $_[0],  10 ) ) ) ) }
sub  xx20{ int(  20**(  20**( rand() * logN( $_[0],  20 ) ) ) ) }
sub xx100{ int( 100**( 100**( rand() * logN( $_[0], 100 ) ) ) ) }
[download]

which I actually prefer to your original because they drop faster at the beginning but don't dip so low at the end, but they are computationally expensive and require the upper limited supplied as a log.

Then I tried varying the exponent on yours, and found its ease of tunability the winning feature. Many thanks.

graph (The above 4 are red, blue, green and cyan respectively, your original(^2) is magenta, and my chosen variation on it (^4) is yellow.)

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