| > Why is the normal distribution important here? There may be a terminological confusion at work here. A normal or uniform number shows no internal pattern: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number Quote: "In mathematics, a normal number is a real number whose infinite sequence of digits in every base b[1] is distributed uniformly in the sense that each of the b digit values has the same natural density 1/b, also all possible b^2 pairs of digits are equally likely with density b^−2, all b^3 triplets of digits equally likely with density b^−3, etc." There are also pseudorandom generators whose purpose it is to generate results that agree with a normal or Gaussian distribution, for particular purposes. http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Gaussian.html Quote: "This note is about the topic of generating Gaussian pseudo-random numbers given a source of uniform pseudo-random numbers." The problem here is that a normal number shows a uniform distribution of its digits among the possible values, and the term normal distribution is sometimes used to describe this outcome. > In programming, people often start from the uniform distribution, don't they? Yes, and as set out above, this starting point may be described in a confusing way. |