comment on

You more or less have it.

I haven't a clue how I'd go about it though :( (Offers?:)

For my standard consulting rate? ;-)

Basically, you want to take a uniform distribution between 0 and M, and map it to a non-uniform one between 0 and N, so that X+I < X+J when I < J. One way to do this is to generate a ~~step-function~~piecewise linear function, then translate values through that ~~step~~ function. In Matlab, it looks something like this for a 10-step function:

fx = [0,cumsum(unifrnd(0,1,1,10))];
tmp=unifrnd(1,10,1,1e5);
ix=floor(tmp);
dx=rem(tmp,1);
values = (fx(ix) + (fx(ix+1)-fx(ix)).*dx)./fx(end-1);
[download]

Using a spline would be more complicated, but would be smoother.

In reply to Re^5: Randomly biased, random numbers. by educated_foo
in thread Randomly biased, random numbers. by BrowserUk

Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>
Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.


Perl Monk, Perl Meditation
	PerlMonks