Re: weighted biased dice roll (bugs)

[tye]

That code is wrong in three ways, as far as I can tell.

The biggest problem is that you need to pass the sum of all of the weights to rand(). If the weights happen to all add up to 1, then rand() with no arguments is fine. (Update: The original code didn't have weights that added up to 1.)

You don't really need the outer while(1) loop. Instead, just return the last item even if subtracting its weight from $rand doesn't quite get you to 0.

Using each means you need to reset the iterator, preferably both before and after.

No, none of that is necessarily going to help you understand the code. I might take a stab at explaining at a later time, if nobody else does. :)

[ikegami]

Each call of the function iterates over a new hash, so the iterator doesn't need resetting.

[sys0p]

I have figured it out, thanks anyway!