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Interesting that you would worry about repeats. Most people would interpret "randomly read 20 pages" as "choose 20 from n" not "take 20 rand(n)".
by mark-r 8y ago
Interesting that you would worry about repeats. Most people would interpret "randomly read 20 pages" as "choose 20 from n" not "take 20 rand(n)".
- dahart 8y agoYou're right, and mathematicians and computer scientists aren't most people. We are being pedantic / precise here. If someone wants to caution that people need to be really careful about estimates because there are some assumptions involved, then it's fair to hold them to their own standard, isn't it? If typos are uniform, then the suggestion to read random pages doesn't help. And whether or not people interpret it one way most of the time, if you interpret "random" like a programmer, you've introduced a small amount of bias, right?
- mark-r 8y agoAs a programmer it still never would have occurred to me to interpret it that way, but maybe I'm not typical. If your random library doesn't have a choose function, it's easy enough to just shuffle a list and take the first 20.