Note that in practice, even with a perfect shuffling algorithm not all permutations will have equal probability when using a typical rand() function. The problem is that your typical rand() function uses an integer as a seed, and the number of possible seeds is tiny compared to the number of permutations for "large" lists (where "large" might mean something greater than 12).
For example, if you are shuffling 52 items, you have 52! or about 10^68 permutations. Compare that to the roughly 10^10 values that are possible for a 32-bit integer!
-
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.
|
