Trouble understanding why (myMax-myMin+1)+myMin is used to generate random numbers within a range

JavaScript
#1

Tell us what’s happening:

Ok, so this isn’t really in regards to the code so much as understanding HOW and WHY we would get to the conclusion of needing (myMax - myMin + 1)) + myMin ???

I’m just confused how it got there and the instructions didn’t help me make sense of this. Is this just some formula I’m meant to memorize? Was I meant to come to this conclusion naturally?? This is the second code I have just copied the instruction code directly and gotten the right answer, but not actually understood what was going on.

From the challenge:

"Here’s the formula we’ll use. Take a moment to read it and try to understand what this code is doing:

Math.floor(Math.random() * (max - min + 1)) + min"

I don’t under stand what this code is doing.

Thank you in advance for any help

Your code so far

// Example
function ourRandomRange(ourMin, ourMax) {

  return Math.floor(Math.random() * (ourMax - ourMin + 1)) + ourMin;
}

ourRandomRange(1, 9);

// Only change code below this line.

function randomRange(myMin, myMax) {

  return Math.floor(Math.random() * (myMax - myMin + 1)) + myMin; // Change this line

}

// Change these values to test your function
var myRandom = randomRange(5, 15);

Your browser information:

Your Browser User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36.

Link to the challenge:

#2

It is easy to understand when you take myMin as zero. Then the function effectively becomes:

function randomRange(myMax) {
  return Math.floor(Math.random() * (myMax + 1)); 
}

If you set myMax to 10, you get: `return Math.floor(Math.random() * (11));

  1. Math.random() generates a number between 0 (included) and 1 (excluded).
  2. Multiply that number by 11 and you get a number between 0 and 11 (excluded)
  3. Math.floor() rounds that number down to the closest integer.
  4. You now have an integer with an integer value in the range of 0 (included) and 10 (included).

All you do when you add myMin is:

  1. You decrease the range by myMin inside Math.floor()
  2. You add myMin to the result to make sure that you get the right range (else it would start from 0)
#3

I think there are 2 things that are important to understand here:

#1) is that Math.floor() always returns the largest integer less than or equal to a given real number, so even if the argument is (for ex.) 1.9999999, it will always return 1.

#2) is that Math.random() always returns a random number between 0 and 1, that is inclusive of 0 but not of 1

once you understand these 2 things, then for the given example , random range (1,9) take a look at the 2 extreme cases of Math.random(),

(1) Math.random() = 0
For this case, every thing in the parentheses will evaluate to 0 and if you don’t add the min of the range, your result will be 0. And this will not fall in the range of (1,9), hence you add the minimum of the range to it.

(2)Math.random = 0.9999999
For this case, the range (Max-Min) = 8, and when you multiply it by the random number you get 7.99999 , then, when you run Math.floor() on this real number it will evaluate to 7 , finally when you add the minimum of the range to it, the function will only evaluate to 8, meaning that the upper range of the request (9) will never be returned, therefore you must add 1 to your range before Math.floor() function is executed.

edit: @BenGitter, also responded with an answer along the same line of thought while I was typing this, just thought I’d post mine anyways.

1 Like
#4

@BenGitter and @Dereje1

Y’all really helped this make sense for me!! Thank you both so much :grin:

Absolutely no way I was going to discover that on my own, but I’m slowly learning to think more along these lines :slight_smile:

#5