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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:10:57
Mok-Kong Shen (mok-kong.shen@stud.uni-muenchen.de)
Tue, 11 Aug 1998 17:33:44 +0100
Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>
> 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.
If you are of the opinion that computer arithmetics are all bad
approximations, you are certainly absolutely right.
M. K. Shen
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:10:57