Re: [Phys-L] From a Math Prof (physics BS major) at my institution ( math challenge)

[Paul Nord <paul.nord@valpo.edu>]

You are throwing out random numbers when you don’t “like” them.  Specifically, you generate new random numbers whenever the numbers are too close together.  Are you sure that’s random?  Granted, it probably won’t break the Mersenne Twister generator used by Octave.  But it is suspicious that you are discarding things which look very much like the pattern for which you are searching.

Wouldn’t it be better to do a:
for  n=35:31 
	…
	rn = fix(1+rand*n)
	…
end

and then map those numbers onto the integers in the list?

Paul



On Feb 25, 2014, at 9:58 AM, Jeffrey Schnick <JSchnick@Anselm.Edu> wrote:

>    for m=1:n
>        a=zeros(21,5);
>        for i=1:21
>            a(i,1) = fix(1+rand*35);
>            for j = 2:5
>                rn = fix(1+rand*35);
>                while any(rn==a(i,1:j-1))
>                    rn = fix(1+rand*35);
>                end
>                a(i,j)=rn;
>            end
>        end