Percentage chance of something happening

[drewbee]

Wow... I new I should have paid attention in my statistics class.

This is a confusing one (atleast for me).
(simplified)
A person comes to the site and has a certain percentage chance(x) of doing A, otherwise its B

X can be 20% - 90%

I am at a complete loss of this one, and I do not even know where to start.

Can this be done through plain math, or will I have to keep track by number increments and determine how much one has been displayed over the other?

[AndyB]

It's not really clear what your question is. The chance of something happening is the same regardless of all previous events, e.g. if you toss a coin and it comes up 'heads' nine times in a row, the probability of it being 'tails' the next time is still 50%.

[drewbee]

[!--quoteo(post=375946:date=May 21 2006, 10:28 PM:name=AndyB)--][div class=\'quotetop\']QUOTE(AndyB @ May 21 2006, 10:28 PM) [snapback]375946[/snapback][/div][div class=\'quotemain\'][!--quotec--]
It's not really clear what your question is. The chance of something happening is the same regardless of all previous events, e.g. if you toss a coin and it comes up 'heads' nine times in a row, the probability of it being 'tails' the next time is still 50%.
[/quote]

Apologies. What I am looking for is the certain WEIGHTED percentage chance of something to happen.

So it could be a split of 70/30, 50/50, 30/70 etc

I have come up with something, although I am not sure how resource intense it is.

Basically what I do is populate an array (1-100). Value A will fill the array at the rate of "chance" it has to get selected, then fill the rest of the array with the other option B

Then simply select a random number between 1 and 100. Since their will be more A's (if their is a 65% chance of selecting an A, their will be 65 A's, and 35 B's, as such it will be more likely to select an A then a B).

[code]
$chance = 65;

$collection = array();

for ($i=1;$i<=100;$i++)
{
    if ($i <= $chance)
    {
        $collection[$i] = "A";
    }
    else
    {
        $collection[$i] = "B";
    }
}
$select = rand(1,100);
echo "This was selected: $collection[$select]";
[/code]

I ran a script execution time on it ( 0.000231981277466 ), and I think I am more then content with those results.

If anyone knows a better way to do this, however, please feel free to let me know.

I personally cannot think of another way, but filling a 100 piece array on the fly each and everytime the page loads could be quite a mess after a while. Thoughts?

[AndyB]

All you want is a probability ...
[code]<?php
$chance =65; // or whatever number you want
if (rand(1,100)>$chance) {
    $whatever = "A";
} else {
    $whatever = "B";
}
echo $whatever;
?>[/code]

[drewbee]

[!--quoteo(post=375952:date=May 21 2006, 10:53 PM:name=AndyB)--][div class=\'quotetop\']QUOTE(AndyB @ May 21 2006, 10:53 PM) [snapback]375952[/snapback][/div][div class=\'quotemain\'][!--quotec--]
All you want is a probability ...
[code]<?php
$chance =65; // or whatever number you want
if (rand(1,100)>$chance) {
    $whatever = "A";
} else {
    $whatever = "B";
}
echo $whatever;
?>[/code]
[/quote]

Yeah, that would make a little more sense, thank you sir :)