Re: Generate a sequence of random numbers that sum up to 1?


"fumanchu" <fumanchu@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1145825688.099549.195040@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I'm surprised noone has pursued a course of subtraction rather than
division.

I believe someone did mention the subtraction method in one of the initial
responses. But the problem is this. If you independently sample n numbers
from a given distribution and then rescale, then the scaled numbers still
all have the same distribution (and are uniform in that sense). In the
subtraction method, each comes from a differnt distribution, as others
explained, with the nth being radically different from the first.

Terry Jan Reedy



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