[R] random numbers between 0 and 1

Barry Rowlingson b.rowlingson at lancaster.ac.uk
Wed Oct 21 21:43:52 CEST 2009


On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 8:37 PM, Gábor Csárdi <csardi at rmki.kfki.hu> wrote:
> I would suggest to use the generator at
> http://submoon.freeshell.org/pix/valium/dilbert_rng.jpg
> and subtract 8.5.

 You may laugh (indeed I did) but some medical trials have used (and
poss still do) telephone-a-human random numbers. When deciding to give
medicine or placebo the doctor calls the phone number and asks for a
random number, which is read out, and this decides what the patient
gets.

 I suppose this could be implemented in R with an interface to a
speech recognition engine and a telephone... but runif(100) is easier.

Barry




More information about the R-help mailing list