Message374672
That text is fine, if you feel something needs to be said at all. I really don't. A Pareto distribution of this kind with parameter <= 1.0 has infinite expected value - VERY long tail. Anyone who knows what they're doing already knows that. The reason the implementation can't "blow up" for parameters >= (roughly) 0.1 isn't that IEEE doubles have such a large dynamic range but rather that they can't represent a number < 1.0 larger than 1 - 2**-53 (so u = 1 - random.random() is always at least 2**-53). The actual distribution has infinite expected value nonetheless, but the implementation is incapable of generating any of its very large values (which, while very rare, are also very large). |
|
Date |
User |
Action |
Args |
2020-08-01 21:07:18 | tim.peters | set | recipients:
+ tim.peters, rhettinger, mark.dickinson, serhiy.storchaka, David MacIver |
2020-08-01 21:07:18 | tim.peters | set | messageid: <1596316038.61.0.31234840533.issue41421@roundup.psfhosted.org> |
2020-08-01 21:07:18 | tim.peters | link | issue41421 messages |
2020-08-01 21:07:18 | tim.peters | create | |
|