21.6. Random Numbers
Closely tied to sorting and searching is the generation of random numbers. Often, random numbers are used to put lists out of order. They offer the opportunity to create surprise. They allow you to squeeze more information onto a single page by choosing content randomly for each request. You see this every day on the Web in the form of quotes of the day, banner ads, and session identifiers.
There are two important qualities of truly random numbers: Their distribution is uniform, and each successive value is independent of the previous value. To have a uniform distribution means that no value is generated more often than any other. The idea of independence is that given a sequence of numbers returned by the generator, you ...
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