In writing a computer program, I need to generate a random number. The problem is, it isn't a random number that is linear like between 1 and 100 for example. The number needs to follow a bell curve or normal distribution. A bell curve looks kind of like a bell where the line is highest in the middle and goes down on each side. I know about Z scores and have formulas for computing these values and so on but I'm not sure how to actually generate the random number. Basically, the random number needs to be generated off the normal distribution so that the majority of the random numbers are going to be pretty close to the middle. Anyone have any ideas on how to do this? Thanks in advance.

Well you need to generate you number and then pass them into a function that would simulate the bell curve so an input of 1-180 and the cosine (?) with a multiplier might give you an approximation of what you want.

graeme.

This is pretty big topic. There's no built in solution - even generating good random numbers with uniform distribution is non-trivial.

You may want to look at the book Numerical Recipies in C.
Check out this site: http://www.bearcave.com/misl/misl_te...st/random.html as well.