use Perl

• Politics! (Score:2)

  by pudge (1)

  We recently had our county legislative district caucuses for the Republican Party. The party rules say, in some cases, in the event of a tie, to decide the winner by lot. We had a 7-way tie (with each potential delegate assigned a number), for 6 positions (and since this was for alternate delegates, we needed them in a specific order).
  
  So I whipped out my laptop and wrote something along the lines of:

  perl -le '@a=qw(6 23 57 72 75 78 80); print $a[rand @a]'

  Got a winner, then removed that winner from @a
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by Aristotle (5147)

    That has a subtle bias: picking 1 out of 6 after picking 1 out of 7 does not have the same probability distribution as picking 2 out of 7. The stochastically unbiased way would be thus:

    perl -MList::Util=shuffle -le'print +(shuffle 6 23 57 72 75 78 80)[0..5]'
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Aristotle (5147)

      Err, make that print for (...).
      • Re:Politics! (Score:2)

        by pudge (1) on 2008.05.15 17:24 (#62882) Homepage Journal

        Also, qw(...). :-)

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