Questions tagged [random]
Tasks involving random numbers and/or output.
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Random script that isn't actually random
As a little joke in the office someone wanted a script that randomly picks a name, and said person will make a round of drinks.
Let's call the people John, Jeff, Emma, Steve and Julie.
I thought it ...
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Simulate the Universe!
One nice property of a Turing-complete language is that it can be used to write any program, up to and including the simulation of the entire Universe.
Your job is to do exactly that: write a program ...
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Shortest code to produce non-deterministic output
You need to produce output that is non-deterministic.
In this case, this will be defined to mean that the output will not always be the same result.
Rules:
A pseudo-random number generator that ...
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Golfing A Weasel Program
Richard Dawkins in his book The Blind Watchmaker, describes a Weasel program. The algorithm can be described as follows:
Start with a random string of 28 characters. Valid characters are all ...
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Do X without Y
Usually, it is said that "Doing X without Y" can be a trap to beginners writing challenges (source). However, I am cocky and think that I can definitely make an X without any Ys. Randomly. Oh yes, ...
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Duck, duck, goose!
Remember the kids game, 'Duck, Duck, Goose'? No? Me neither.
The challenge
Print the word 'duck' on individual lines an indeterminate amount of times.
Print the word 'goose'.
Your program ends.
The ...
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Implement Minceraft
Introduction
The game Minecraft has a 1 in 10000 chance of showing "Minceraft" instead of "Minecraft" on the title screen.
Your challenge
Your challenge is to code a function or ...
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How to randomize letters in a word
According to some controversial story, the odrer of ltteres in a wrod deos not mttaer much for raednig, as lnog as the frist and lsat lteter macth with the orignial wrod.
So, for fun, what would be ...
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Alex-style Addition
Inspired by Alex's glorious Learn you an R for great good, we are going to humbly recreate Alex's "one true R program" -- but with a twist.
Alex-style Addition works like this -- it has a 90% chance ...
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A game of dice, but avoid number 6
Tournament over!
The tournament is now over! The final simulation was run during the night, a total of \$3*10^8\$ games. The winner is Christian Sievers with his bot OptFor2X. Christian Sievers also ...
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Cracking in progress
Remember those brute-force programs to crack password that show every combination they are trying? More precisely, at one point, the n first characters are fixed (they have been guessed successfully), ...
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Can you Golf Golf?
You are required to generate a random 18-hole golf course.
Example output:
[3 4 3 5 5 4 4 4 5 3 3 4 4 3 4 5 5 4]
Rules:
Your program must output a list of hole ...
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Random Golf of the Day #7: A distinctly random character
About the Series
This is a guest entry for the Random Golf of the Day series.
First off, you may treat this like any other code golf challenge, and answer it without worrying about the series at all....
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99 bugs in the code
99 bugs in the code
The adaption of "99 bottles of beer on the wall" for computer science where the bugs increase instead of the bottles decreasing is often re-posted around the internet. ...
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Improvise a Hardware Random-Number Generator
Your task is to improvise a hardware random-number generator with whatever hardware you have lieing around.
Challenge
Write a program with the following properties:
It prints either ...
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Build a random number generator that passes the Diehard tests
While there are many code golf questions on here involving randomness, I haven't seen one yet that actually asks for building an algorithmic pseudorandom number generator. There's this one that asks ...
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Display random colored pixels
I've always liked screens full of randomly colored pixels. They're interesting to look at and the programs that draw them are fun to watch.
The challenge
Fill your screen, or a graphical window, ...
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Simulate reproduction in a population of oozes
Reproductive strategy of oozes can be summarized as follows:
o O 8 oo
A population of oozes at generation N is described by a string, for example:
...
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Print random integers until 0
You are to write a program which generates random integers between \$0\$ and \$99\$ inclusive, outputting each integer in turn, until \$0\$ is generated. You may choose which single-order random ...
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This will eventually stop…
Given an input string S, print S followed by a non-empty separator in the following way:
Step 1: ...
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Scramble words while preserving their outlines
This is much more advanced than How to randomize letters in a word and Cambridge Transposition because of the rule about which letters may be swapped with which. A simple regex will not suffice here.
...
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Random point on a sphere
The Challenge
Write a program or function that takes no input and outputs a 3-dimensional vector of length \$1\$ in a theoretically uniform random direction.
This is equivalent to a random point on ...
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Chaos is an ASCII ladder
You know nothing The things I do for "Chaos is a ladder" is a memorable line from the television series Game of Thrones.
The purpose of this challenge is to build a ladder from chaos, in ...
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EASY to memorize numbers
Numbers that are easy to remember yet theoretically not easily made
Your challenge is to make a program/function in any language that generates uniformly random numbers that fit these criteria:
...
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Random Capitalization
The Task
Your task is to create a program or a function that, given an input, outputs the input text with random letters capitalized, while keeping already capitalized letters capitalized.
Every ...
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Sheffle tho vawols ureund!
Given an input string, output that string with all vowels a, e, i, ...
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Random Password Generator
The domain server requires that all employees have a strong, random password conforming to the following rules:
Exactly 15 characters long.
Keyboard-typeable characters only (as shown in code-type ...
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Create a solar system
Intro
This is based on an actual problem I recently faced while making a computer game and I thought it would make for a nice round of code-golf.
There are seven main spectral classes of star which ...
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Output a random unary string
Your task is simple: output the letter x a random number of times. Every possible length of xs must have a non-zero probability ...
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Natural Pi #0 - Rock
Goal
Create a program/function that takes an input N, check if N random pairs of integers are relatively prime, and returns <...
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Randomizing until 0
Challenge
Sandbox post
Given a positive integer (K) Output a uniformly-random integer (Y) between ...
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Crazy 8s Code Golf
Create a program that prints all whole numbers inclusively between an interval (a, b), and replaces multiples of 8 in the sequence with random (uniformly ...
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10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 in PHP (or anything else, for that matter)
Just had a 'spirited' conversation with a co-worker about the succinctness of the following BASIC statement:
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It's the title ...
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Simulating Exploding Dice
Your task is to make a program that takes in an integer n > 1, and outputs the roll of a single n-sided die. However, this ...
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Passwordify the string
Your challenge is to passwordify the string! What is passwordifying, you ask?
Take a string as input. This string will only contain uppercase letters, lowercase letters, digits, and spaces.
You ...
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Code Golf: Your own pet ASCII snake
So, I wrote myself a one-liner which printed out a snake on the console. It's a bit of fun, and I wondered how I might condense my code...
Here's a (short) example output:
...
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Create a Magic 8 Ball
As a child, my friend had a magic 8 ball that we would ask questions to and see what the fate of that question was.
Challenge
Your challenge is to write a program (or function) that when run (or ...
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That's a lot of monkeys
The infinite monkey theorem states that, given infinite time, a machine sending an endless stream of random characters will always type any given text.
That sounds to me like a great idea for a ...
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Russian Roulette
Write a program which plays Russian Roulette!
If the program is started,
there should be a 5 in 6 chance of it ending normally after printing "I survived!"
there should be a 1 in 6 chance of the ...
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Random Golf of the Day #1: Shuffle an Array
About the Series
I will be running a little series of code-golf challenges revolving around the theme of randomness. This will basically be a 9-Hole Golf Course, but spread out over several questions....
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Generating a random alphanumeric string of length N
What is the shortest way of generating a random string with a given length and with only alphanumeric characters allowed?
example of a random string: with N = 9 output would be ...
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The cat ate your input again!
Create a cat program, a.k.a a program that takes an input and prints it.
...Except, the program will randomly take characters away from your input and print that instead.
Each character in the input ...
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Quixels - Quantum Pixels
Introduction
A quixel is a quantum pixel. Similar to a classical pixel, it is represented with 3 integer values (Red, Green, Blue). However, quixels are in a super position of these 3 states instead ...
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Random numbers with fixed sum
Your task is to write a program or a function that outputs n random numbers from interval [0,1] with fixed sum s.
Input
...
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1/N probability
Because there are not enough simple code-golf challenges:
Create an optionally unnamed program or function that, given (by any means) an integer 1 ≤ N ≤ 10000, outputs your language's True value with ...
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Generate a "GitHub" Avatar
Background / Description
Note: as @HelkaHomba points out, the actual GitHub identicons are not actually random but based on the hash of a username
The default GitHub avatar is a 5x5-pixel image. A ...
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Choose The Powerball Numbers!
Powerball is an American lottery that has recently gained attention because the current jackpot (as of January 11, 2016) is the largest lotto prize in history, at about $1.5 billion (USD).
Powerball ...
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Generate a Nine-Ball Pool rack
Introduction
Nine-Ball is a popular pool game played casually and as a competitive sport.
There is one of each numbered ball, with the numbers 1 to 9.
The game starts with all 9 of the balls in a ...
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Implement the Zundoko Kiyoshi function
Background
The Zundoko Kiyoshi function originates from this tweet by kumiromilk. Translated from Japanese, it reads roughly as follows:
The test for my Java lecture had a problem that said "...
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Rand5() to Rand7() [closed]
You are provided with a function Rand5(). This function returns perfectly random (equal distribution) integers between 1 and 5.
Provide the function Rand7(), which uses Rand5() to produce perfectly ...
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