Generate a random binary number with a variable proportion of '1' bits

Question

I need a function to generate random integers. (assume Java long type for now, but this will be extended to BigInteger or BitSet later

Answer 1

If you're looking to apply some distribution where with probability P you get a 1 and with probability 1-P you get a 0 at any particular bit your best bet is simply to generate each bit independently with probability P of being a 1 (that sounds like a recursive definition, I know).

Here's a solution, I'll walk through it below:

public class MyRandomBitGenerator
{

    Random pgen = new Random();

    // assumed p is well conditioned (0 < p < 1)
    public boolean nextBitIsOne(double p){
        return pgen.nextDouble() < p ? true : false;
    }

    // assumed p is well conditioned (0 < p < 1)
    public long nextLong(double p){
        long nxt = 0;
        for(int i = 0; i < 64; i++){
           if(nextBitIsOne(p)){
               nxt += 1 << i;
           }
        }
        return nxt;
    }

}

Basically, we first determine how to generate a value of 1 with probability P: pgen.nextDouble() generates a number between 0 and 1 with uniform probability, by asking if it's less than p we're sampling this distribution such that we expect to see p 1s as we call this function infinitely.