Random - java.util

Random

The Random class is a generator of pseudorandom numbers. These are called pseudorandom numbers because they are simply uniformly distributed sequences. Random defines the following constructors:

Random( ) Random(long seed)

The first version creates a number generator that uses a reasonably unique seed. The second form allows you to specify a seed value manually.

If you initialize a Random object with a seed, you define the starting point for the random sequence. If you use the same seed to initialize another Random object, you will extract the same random sequence. If you want to generate different sequences, specify different seed values. One way to do this is to use the current time to seed a Random object. This approach reduces the possibility of getting repeated sequences.

The core public methods defined by Random are shown in Table 19-7. These are the methods that have been available in Random for several years (many since Java 1.0) and are widely used.

As you can see, there are seven types of random numbers that you can extract from a Random object. Random Boolean values are available from nextBoolean( ). Random bytes can be obtained by calling nextBytes( ). Integers can be extracted via the nextInt( ) method. Long integers, uniformly distributed over their range, can be obtained with nextLong( ). The nextFloat( ) and nextDouble( ) methods return a uniformly distributed float and double, respectively, between 0.0 and 1.0. Finally, nextGaussian( ) returns a double value centered at 0.0 with a standard deviation of 1.0. This is what is known as a bell curve.

Here is an example that demonstrates the sequence produced by nextGaussian( ). It obtains 100 random Gaussian values and averages these values. The program also counts the

Method : Description

boolean nextBoolean( ) : Returns the next boolean random number.

void nextBytes(byte vals[ ]) : Fills vals with randomly generated values.

double nextDouble( ) : Returns the next double random number.

float nextFloat( ) : Returns the next float random number.

double nextGaussian( ) : Returns the next Gaussian random number.

int nextInt( ) : Returns the next int random number.

int nextInt(int n) : Returns the next int random number within the range zero to n.

long nextLong( ) : Returns the next long random number.

void setSeed(long newSeed) : Sets the seed value (that is, the starting point for the random number generator) to that specified by newSeed.

Table 19-7   The Core Methods Defined by Random

number of values that fall within two standard deviations, plus or minus, using increments of 0.5 for each category. The result is graphically displayed sideways on the screen.

// Demonstrate random Gaussian values.

import java.util.Random;

class RandDemo {

public static void main(String args[]) { Random r = new Random();

double val; double sum = 0;

int bell[] = new int[10];

for(int i=0; i<100; i++) { val = r.nextGaussian(); sum += val;

double t = -2;

for(int x=0; x<10; x++, t += 0.5) if(val < t) {

bell[x]++;

break;

}

}

System.out.println("Average of values: " + (sum/100));

// display bell curve, sideways

for(int i=0; i<10; i++) {

for(int x=bell[i]; x>0; x--) System.out.print("*");

System.out.println();

}

}

}

Here is a sample program run. As you can see, a bell-like distribution of numbers is obtained.

Average of values: 0.0702235271133344

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JDK 8 adds three new methods to Random that support the new stream API (see Chapter 29). They are called doubles( ), ints( ), and longs( ), and each returns a reference to a stream that contains a sequence of pseudorandom values of the specified type. Each method defines several overloads. Here are their simplest forms:

DoubleStream doubles( ) IntStream ints( ) LongStream longs( )

The doubles( ) method returns a stream that contains pseudorandom double values. (The range of these values will be less than 1.0 but greater than 0.0.) The ints( ) method returns a stream that contains pseudorandom int values. The longs( ) method returns a stream that contains pseudorandom long values. For these three methods, the stream returned is effectively infinite. Several overloads of each method are provided that let you specify the size of the stream, an origin, and an upper bound.