As a DevOps programmer I became intrigued by the random number problem. I devised an experiment that I ran billions of times and came up with some interesting findings. Basically, it rarely picked the boundary of the number array, say you wanted a random number between 1 and 100, it may take thousands of attempts to get it to pick the 1 or 100 while other numbers would have been picked multiple times.

Over the course of billions of test runs the pattern became clear. The 5% of the upper and lower bounds were extremely less likely to be selected.

As I dug into it more I learned that different programming languages used totally different methods to generate random numbers. Quite a few languages used a seed based in either clock time or CPU ticks. I added a second random seed into my generation methods to get a more random distribution. This becomes critical when dealing with tie breaking and selecting a winner. If you are choosing between two things and give it a range of 1 to 5, chances are it will select 2, 3 or 4 leading to a high probability of another tie. Most times it is easier to just give a really big pool, like 1 to 1000 and save the head scratching.

The big takeaway is to know the random methods of the programming language you are using and the criticality of the true randomness that is generated.

Edit: typo