Does the rand function ever produce values of 0 or 1 in MATLAB/Octave?

Question

I'm looking for a function that will generate random values between 0 and 1, inclusive. I have generated 120,000 random values by using rand() function in octave, but haven't once got the values 0 or 1 as output. Does rand() ever produce such values? If not, is there any other function I can use to achieve the desired result?

Answer 1

If you read the documentation of rand in both Octave and MATLAB, it is an open interval between (0,1), so no, it shouldn't generate the numbers 0 or 1.

However, you can perhaps generate a set of random integers, then normalize the values so that they lie between [0,1]. So perhaps use something like randi (MATLAB docs, Octave docs) where it generates integer values from 1 up to a given maximum. With this, define this maximum number, then subtract by 1 and divide by this offset maximum to get values between [0,1] inclusive:

max_num = 10000; %// Define maximum number
N = 1000; %// Define size of vector
out = (randi(max_num, N, 1) - 1) / (max_num - 1); %// Output

If you want this to act more like rand but including 0 and 1, make the max_num variable quite large.