Random numbers and floor vs round function
Why if I use random number generator and range 0 - 9 I don't get the same uniform distributi开发者_开发问答on as combined it with the floor function?
Math.floor(Math.random() * 10)
gives quite uniform distribution, while Math.round(Math.random() * 10)
doesn't.
Math.floor() returns 0 for any value in the range [0, 1) (1 exclusive), 1 for any value in the range [1, 2), etc.
So if we have equal chances of getting a number in one of these ranges, we will get an equal distribution of 0's and 1's.
Math.round(), however, returns 0 for values under 0.5, 1 for values under 1.5, etc.
So we actually have half the chances of getting a 0, as only values from 0 to 0.5 will round to 0.
╔═════════╦═════════╦═════════╗
║ Range ║ floor() ║ round() ║
╠═════════╬═════════╬═════════╣
║ [0, 1) ║ 0 ║ 0 or 1 ║
║ [1, 2) ║ 1 ║ 1 or 2 ║
║ [2, 3) ║ 2 ║ 2 or 3 ║
║ ... ║ ... ║ ... ║
║ [9, 10) ║ 9 ║ 9 or 10 ║
╚═════════╩═════════╩═════════╝
I really like to trigger 31-bit int instead of Math.floor()
, by doing a binary "or 0" operation. It makes it slightly faster (stack vs heap,) seems a tad neater, and does the same thing, in a practical sense. Here is an example that gets a random element of an array:
var ar=[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0,'a','b','c','d']
console.log(ar[(Math.random() * ar.length) |0])
This might seem like premature optimization, but as I said, I like how it looks, and it takes less typing than Math.floor()
. Using Math.round()
would require an extra step (because the spread is 1
to ar.length
not 0
to ar.length-1
)
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