12-29-2008
When you use a modulus operation you are selecting information from the low order bits of a number and discarding information from the high order bits.
"these bits should be extracted from the most significant (left-hand) part
of the computer word, since the least significant bits produced by many random number generators are not sufficiently random."
and
"The least significant (right-hand) digits of X are not very random, so decisions based on the number X should always be influenced primarily by the most significant digits. It is generally best to think of X as a random fraction X/m between 0 and 1, that is, to visualize X with a decimal point at its left, rather than to regard X as a random integer between 0 and m - 1. To compute a random integer between 0 and k - 1, one should multiply by k and truncate the result."
both from The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2 Seminumerical Algorithms by Donald Knuth
While neither is perfect, assuming that 0 <= RANDOM <= 32767,
((myrandom = RANDOM * 50 / 32768))
will behave better than
((myrandom = RANDOM % 50))
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LEARN ABOUT MOJAVE
urandom
RANDOM(4) BSD Kernel Interfaces Manual RANDOM(4)
NAME
random , urandom -- random data source devices.
SYNOPSIS
pseudo-device random
DESCRIPTION
The random device produces uniformly distributed random byte values of potentially high quality.
To obtain random bytes, open /dev/random for reading and read from it.
The same random data is also available from getentropy(2). Using the getentropy(2) system call interface will provide resiliency to file
descriptor exhaustion, chroot, or sandboxing which can make /dev/random unavailable. Additionally, the arc4random(3) API provides a fast
userspace random number generator built on the random data source and is preferred over directly accessing the system's random device.
/dev/urandom is a compatibility nod to Linux. On Linux, /dev/urandom will produce lower quality output if the entropy pool drains, while
/dev/random will prefer to block and wait for additional entropy to be collected. With Yarrow, this choice and distinction is not necessary,
and the two devices behave identically. You may use either.
The random device implements the Yarrow pseudo random number generator algorithm and maintains its entropy pool. The kernel automatically
seeds the algorithm with additional entropy during normal execution.
FILES
/dev/random
/dev/urandom
HISTORY
A random device appeared in the Linux operating system.
Darwin September 6, 2001 Darwin