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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:10:57
Perry E. Metzger (perry@piermont.com)
Tue, 11 Aug 1998 10:40:34 -0400
Mok-Kong Shen writes:
> Mark Tillotson wrote:
> In general computing I suppose it is well-known that one can obtain
> any statistical distribution (discrete or not) from a uniform
> distribution in [0,1).
I suppose it is not well known that the floating point numbers between
0 and 1 do not constitute a uniform distribution over the space [0,1),
and that, in fact, the distribution has very bad properties. See any
book on numerical analysis for a discussion of this.
You are not, remember, dealing with reals. You are dealing with a bad
approximation, "floating point" numbers.
Perry
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:10:57