[Tutor] What's the best way to model an unfair coin?

[Steven D'Aprano]

Richard D. Moores wrote:
> What's the best way to model an unfair coin?

Let probability of heads = p, where 0 <= p <= 1
Then probability of tails = 1-p.

if random.random() <= p: print("got heads")
else: print("got tails")

[...]
> That's the only way I can think of. But surely there's a better, more
> general solution. What if the probability I want is an irrational
> number, such as 1/e? Sure, I can calculate a fraction that's as close
> to that irrational number as I want, but..

Well, technically speaking all floats in Python are rational numbers, 
since they're base-2 floating point numbers. But the difference between 
(say) float pi and the true irrational number π is around about
0.0000000000000001, so close enough for most purposes.



-- 
Steven