Timeline for Uniformly random decimal numbers
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
5 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Dec 7, 2021 at 21:39 | comment | added | C8H10N4O2 | If (0,1) was really continuous, the probability of getting a given exact number back becomes zero, so you would never expect to see 0.1 or any other particular real number. If we're limiting to some known precision, then random should work fine, but you may need to use stochastic rounding to avoid bias one way or the other (useful to speed up convergence for some deep learning algorithms, for example). | |
| Dec 7, 2021 at 17:04 | comment | added | user16034 | A much more serious issue is the use of the generators based on the rand function, returning a natural number up to RAND_MAX. On existing implementations, it only provides 15 significant bits ! | |
| Dec 7, 2021 at 16:55 | comment | added | user16034 | Methods involving random numbers, such as stochastic simulation, usually compute gross approximations (say to four or fixe exact digits) which are completely unaffected by the non-uniformity you mention (only on the fifteenth significant digit or so). A situation where this matters would be pathological IMO. | |
| Dec 7, 2021 at 16:11 | history | edited | Matthieu Latapy | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 1 character in body
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| Dec 7, 2021 at 15:56 | history | asked | Matthieu Latapy | CC BY-SA 4.0 |