How random is JavaScript's Math.random?

Question

Given numbers between 1 and 100.

• 9 have 1 digit (1-9)
• 90 have 2 digits (10-99)
• 1 has 3 digits (100)

Given numbers between 1 and 1000.

• 9 have 1 digit
• 90 have 2 digits
• 900 have 3 digits
• 1 has 4 digits

and so on.

So if you select some at random, then that vast majority of selected numbers will have the same number of digits, because the vast majority of possible values have the same number of digits.

Your results are actually expected. If the random numbers are uniformly distributed in a range 1 to 10^n, then you would expect about 9/10 of the numbers to have n digits, and a further 9/100 to have n-1 digits.

There different types of randomness. Math.random gives you an uniform distribution of numbers.

If you want different orders of magnitude, I would suggest using an exponential function to create what's called a power law distribution:

function random_powerlaw(mini, maxi) {
    return Math.ceil(Math.exp(Math.random()*(Math.log(maxi)-Math.log(mini)))*mini)
}

This function should give you roughly the same number of 1-digit numbers as 2-digit numbers and as 3-digit numbers.

There are also other distributions for random numbers like the normal distribution (also called Gaussian distribution).

Looks perfectly random to me! (Hint: It's browser dependent.)

Personally, I think my implementation would be better, although I stole it off from XKCD, who should ALWAYS be acknowledged:

function random() {
  return 4; // Chosen by a fair dice throw. Guaranteed to be random.
}