How do I generate a Poisson Process?

Question

Original Question:

I want to generate a Poisson process. If the number of arrivals by time t is N(t) and I have a Poisson distribution with parameter

Answer 1

The discussion here has all the details about using inverse sampling to generate inter-arrivals, which is usually what people want to do for games.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/15307412/1650437

Answer 2

In python, you can try below code.

If you want to generate 20 random readings in 60 seconds. ie (20 is the lambda)

 def poisson_job_generator():
    rateParameter = 1.0/float(60/20) 
    while True:
        sl = random.expovariate(rateParameter)