I was researching how floats are stored in a computer and was trying to think up a way to generate random values between 0 and 1. Python already provides an implementation allowing this already, and two of the functions below are directly inspired by that code, but the third is a slightly different way of doing the same thing. A similar version of this code has been used to implement similar functionality in C# at one time. Others might also find it useful if they want to create equivalent code in a separate language while having access to random bytes but not random floats. It should be noted that the various implementations get slower as you go down the list.
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Copy to clipboard1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 | import os
import struct
def random_1():
return (int.from_bytes(os.urandom(7), 'big') >> 3) * 2 ** -53
def random_2():
return (int.from_bytes(os.urandom(7), 'big') >> 3) / (1 << 53)
def random_3():
array = bytearray(b'\x3F' + os.urandom(7))
array[1] |= 0xF0
return struct.unpack('>d', array)[0] - 1
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If anyone can think up other ways to generate floats between 0 and 1, they would be nice to see. Someone might have a particularly ingenious way of doing this that others have not seen yet.
