>>POV-Ray's random number generator gives uniformly distributed real numbers.
> 
>   Actually no. It gives uniformly distributed real numbers between 0 and 1,
> which is a slightly different thing.

Well yeah, but you know what I *mean* ;-)

>   (And we can also split hairs by noting that floating points numbers aren't
> real numbers but a finite set of rational numbers, but would not be relevant
> here... :) )

True. (I do recall asking how far apart these numbers are, but never 
really got an answer...)

>>Any idea how to transform these into normally distributed numbers?
> 
>   You can approximate a normal distribution of numbers between 0 and 1
> by taking the sum of n equally-distributed numbers and dividing the
> result by n. The higher the n, the more closely it resembles normal
> distribution, but for practical purposes you don't need a very large n.
> Even n=3 already gives a pretty good distribution.

...because the means of different samples from a given population are 
normally distributed around the true mean of the population? (And the 
true mean of a *truely* uniform distribution from 0 to 1 would be 0.5)

Andrew @ home.

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