Random integer generation - only different numbers

[Balazs]

Is there a way to generate n random numbers that all different ?
The standard random widget generates same identical numbers in the list too.

[wim (Wim Dekeyser)]

Real random numbers

Only if you have access to a source of genuine randomness. Computers are deterministic machines as as such cannot exhibit genuinely random behaviour. Brian Hayes has a decent introductory lecture on randomness, notes. Common sources of genuine randomness are Geiger counters and keyboard events and video/audio recordings. The basic idea is that you record a signal and strip away the most significant frequencies, you should then be left with genuine randomness. In the case of key-press events, i…

[DavidRutten]

It is possible, what you do is generate N successive integers, say all numbers from zero to a thousand, then you use Random Reduce to remove some of them. You can finally jitter your remaining list to make the ordering random instead of increasing.

Of course you cannot generate 100 different random integers in the range 0-20, but I’m assuming your range is bigger than your count.

[Balazs]

Thanks a lot

[Balazs]

What does the “jitter” expression means anyway?

[DavidRutten]

Explanation of Jitter component

Would someone be kind enough to explain a little bit what the jitter component does to a set and how it enacts that transformation? This could be a really valuable tool in the future and I’d like to better understand it. Thanks!