The Design Cycle Generating Random Numbers in Code

摘要

Think of a number between 0 and 10. Is your number 3? Did I guess right? If I guessed right, would you say that your mind generated a random number and I just happened to be lucky enough to guess what it was? Or, do you have an affinity to the number 3? Do you have three kids? How about three cars? Why did you come up with the number 3? If I missed the guess and your number was something other than 3, how did you come up with that particular number? Was your choice of numbers really random? Believe it or not, your numerical choice of numbers was most likely not at all truly random. The first thing I did to kill the truly random number selection process was to place a boundary on your choices (0 to 10). The best you could have done toward producing a random number was to provide a quasi-random set of numbers by rearranging the positions of the numbers inside the 0 to 10 number set.