Originally posted by: dmurray14
Originally posted by: EyeMWing
You wanna know what's REALLY funny? Take a ton of brand new TI-83+'s. Their 'random' integer generators are in sync - so long as you pass all of them the same arguments, you'll get the same answers on every one of them. Found this out on the first day of my statistics class.
WEIRD - how does that work? What are they generating these numbers on that is globally synced?
Traditional random number programming uses what's called a random number table. This is a list of integers 0-9 generated either through a random experiment (10-sided die?) or some clever people like myself create them by looking up the first 400 bajillion digits of pi and copying and pasting some of that. This list is then read to create the random numbers. For example, if you have a random number table
5473859473564369218730954783745
and would like a number from 0-400, you take 3 digits at a time, determine if the number you just created is in range, and if it is, keep it, if it's not, throw it out. For example, the first result here would be 547. This gets thrown out, because it's out of range. The next is 385. This is in range, and would be returned as a valid result.
The TI-83+ only increments forward in it's list when a command utilizing it is used, so from the factory, they're all at the beginning of the list.
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