I am looking for a random number generator that can be biased. For instance, say I want a random number between 1-5, with the probability being:
1: Comes up 20% of the time
2: Comes up 10% of the time
3: Comes up 40% of the time
4: Comes up 25% of the time
5: Comes up 5% of the time
Is there anything in the standard library, or other libraries out there that would do this? Alternatively, is there an efficient way to do this myself?
The Boost random number library provides the ability to specify different shaped distributions for your generator. It’s a great library – see http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_42_0/libs/random/index.html.