Biased random?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2007-08-27, Jun-geun Park <junkeun.park at gmail.com> wrote:

>> I have a list of items, and need to choose several elements
>> from it, "almost random". The catch is that the elements from
>> the beginning should have more chance of being selected than
>> those at the end (how much more? I don't care how the
>> "envelope" of probability looks like at this point - can be
>> linear). I see that there are several functions in Python
>> standard libraries for various distribution, but is there an
>> easy pythonic way to make them do what I need?

> That's weird. random.randint(a,b) will be enough for most
> cases. Test your system to see the distribution is uniform
> with something like:

Except he wants a non-uniform distribution.

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