By | December 12, 2019

Zach Wissner-Gross’ column “The Riddler” over at FiveThirtyEight poses the following interesting question, attributed originally to Austin Chen: You have a playlist with exactly 100 tracks (i.e., songs), numbered 1 to 100. To go to another track, there are two buttons you can press: (1) “Next”, which will take you to the next track in… Read More »

## Citing a rare paper by von Neumann: Various techniques used in connection with random digits

By | July 18, 2019

John von Neumann wrote a marvelous paper in 1951 about random variate generation, which is widely cited in the literature. Here is the BibTeX for those who are here for the citation: @incollection{vonNeumann1951, title = {Various Techniques Used in Connection with Random Digits}, author = {von Neumann, John}, booktitle = {Monte Carlo Method}, editor =… Read More »

## Programming and probability: Sampling from a discrete distribution over an infinite set

By | September 2, 2018

This post is an introductory tutorial which presents a simple algorithm for sampling from a discrete probability distribution $p(k)$ defined over a countably infinite set. We also show how to use higher-order programming to implement the algorithm in a modular and reusable way, and how to amortize the cost of sampling using memoization. Introduction and… Read More »

## Notating “conditional” probabilities

By | February 27, 2018

## Hello world!

By | February 13, 2016

Welcome to Random Seed. A good proportion of implementors of probabilistic computation fail to address two key issues relating to entropy control in their software Keeping track of the state of the random number generator. Permuting the random seed. We will look into these two issues, as well as many other topics, throughout future blog posts.