Split value in 24 randomly sized parts using C#

Question

I have a value, say 20010. I want to randomly divide this value over 24 hours. So basically split the value into a 24 slot big array where all slots are randomly big.

Wh

Answer 1

I've calculated the average size of each of the 24 buckets over 100 trials for each of the algorithms proposed here. I thought it was interesting that three out of the four do seem to result in 20010/24 items per bucket on average, but the naive method I described converges to that average most quickly. This makes some intuitive sense to me. That method is something like snowing randomly on 24 buckets, and thus likely to result in buckets which are approximately equal in size. The others are more like hacking randomly at a length of wood.

Bevan:  [751, 845, 809, 750, 887, 886, 838, 868, 837, 902, 841, 812, 818, 774, 815, 857, 752, 815, 896, 872, 833, 864, 769, 894]
Gregory:  [9633, 5096, 2623, 1341, 766, 243, 159, 65, 21, 19, 16, 4, 3, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2]
mjv:  [895, 632, 884, 837, 799, 722, 853, 749, 915, 756, 814, 863, 842, 642, 820, 805, 659, 862, 742, 812, 768, 816, 721, 940]
peterallenwebb:  [832, 833, 835, 829, 833, 832, 837, 835, 833, 827, 833, 832, 834, 833, 836, 833, 838, 834, 834, 833, 834, 832, 836, 830]

And here is the python code: import random

N = 20010;

def mjv():
    gaps = [ random.randrange(0, N) for i in range(0, 24) ]
    gaps = gaps + [0, N]
    gaps.sort()
    value = [ gaps[i+1] - gaps[i] for i in range(0, 24) ]
    return value

def gregory():
    values = []
    remainingPortion = N

    for i in range(0, 23):
        val = random.randrange(1, remainingPortion - (23 - i))
        remainingPortion = remainingPortion - val
        values.append(val)

    values.append(remainingPortion)

    return values


def peterallenwebb():
    values = [0  for i in range(0, 24) ]

    for i in range(0, N):
        k = random.randrange(0, 24)
        values[k] = values[k] + 1 

    return values

def bevan():
    values = [];
    sum = 0.0

    for i in range(0, 24):
        k = random.random()
        sum = sum + k
        values.append(k);

    scaleFactor = N / sum

    for j in range(0, 24):
        values[j] = int(values[j] * scaleFactor)

    return values


def averageBucketSizes(method):
    totals = [0 for i in range(0, 24)]
    trials = 100

    for i in range(0,trials):
        values = method()

        for j in range(0, 24):
            totals[j] = totals[j] + values[j]      

    for j in range(0, 24):
        totals[j] = totals[j] / trials

    return totals;


print 'Bevan: ', averageBucketSizes(bevan)
print 'Gregory: ', averageBucketSizes(gregory)
print 'mjv: ', averageBucketSizes(mjv)
print 'peterallenwebb: ', averageBucketSizes(peterallenwebb)

Let me know if you see any mistakes. I will re-run.