Verified answer

for algorithm check http://codewordblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/generatio...

Yes you can do it, i do something very similar in the line of work i am in, we call them bias tables, ours don't tend to have 350 entries though.

The way it works is :-

this table has 10 entries (0-9)

num 0

ch 10

num 1

ch 10

num 2

ch 10

num 3

ch 10

num 4

ch 10

num 5

ch 10

num 6

ch 10

num 7

ch 10

num 8

ch 10

num 9

ch 10

Each number has a chance associated with it and all the chances must add up to 100 (or in larger tables 1000 or maybe 10000), in the above example you would get a totally random output as all the numbers have the same chance. But if you reduced the chance on numbers 0 and 9 down to 5 and increased the chance of 4 and 5 up to 15 then you would still get random numbers but more chance of 4 and 5 and less chance of 0 and 9.

This is just off the top of my head so there may be a few minor issues but you get the idea :-

You will have to provide a get_random(n) function that returns a number between 0 and n-1, but you can get that anywhere. Yahoo Answers screws up the formatting but you can just cut n paste.

int p100_func(const int *p100_tab,int pfunc_sz)

{

int tot,n,rnd;

int index=123456; /* setup index with magic number */

tot=0; /* clear total counter */

rnd=get_random(100)+1; /* get random number 1-100 */

for(n=0;n<pfunc_sz;n++) { /* work along the percentage table */

tot+=p100_tab[n]; /* toting up the values */

if(tot>=rnd&&index==123456) /* if total > rnd and index=MAGIC */

index=n; /* set index to current table pos */

}

assert(tot==100);

return(index); /* return the index */

}

This is you bias table (it will have to be a big one for your 350 entries) and in this case adds up to 100

const int bias[]={5,10,10,10,15,15,10,10,10,5};

This function call will return a biased value in the range of 0-9 (in your case it will be 0-349)

p100_func(bias,10);

If you start putting parameters on the result it is not random. Not that you can generate random numbers anyway.