I wanted to ask about the output distribution of floating-point rand(): Naively, I would have expected the following distribution: -the sign bit is zero -the mantissa is a random bitstring -the signigicant is an exponentially distributed integer, e.g. const-leading_zeros of an infinite bitstream …

So it took me a bit to grok what all is going on here. This getfloat_trail function transforms a random UInt32 to a Float32. This is different from our current rand(::Float32) — which is approximated here by getfloat_std — in the following ways: Its output is in (0,1) instead of [0,1). 32 bits i…

Output distribution of rand()

Internals & Design

mbauman Closed October 19, 2023, 1:22pm 9

Closing to focus discussion in Output distribution of rand(), thread 2

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Output distribution of rand(Float32) and rand(Float64), thread 2 Internals & Design float , random	437	7080	November 19, 2023
Frédéric Goualard found an inexactness in our rand() Numerics random	19	1045	September 8, 2022
Is it really possible for rand to throw a zero? Statistics question	61	4468	September 18, 2019
Random number in (0,1] General Usage	16	15003	October 8, 2018
Random Float64 over whole range of Float64 General Usage	8	372	February 4, 2023

Output distribution of rand()

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