rnorm

rnorm is a command line tool to generate numbers from the Normal distribution.

npm install -g rnorm
rnorm
> -0.211

There are options to set the mean (--mean) and standard deviation (--sd), print out multiple numbers (--number), and set the printed precision (--precision), but otherwise, that's all it does.

For example, to print out 5 IQ scores drawn from a random sample of the population:

rnorm --mean 100 --sd 10 --number 5 --precision 0
> 116
> 100
> 101
> 108
> 92

It uses the Box-Muller transform to convert two (independent) random numbers from the Standard Uniform distribution (Math.random()) to two (independent) random numbers from the Standard Normal distribution (μ = 0, σ = 1). Thus, it is more efficient to draw an even number of random numbers at a time, but the default is to print just one.

License

Copyright 2015 Christopher Brown. MIT Licensed.