E
August 13, 2010
This puzzle made the rounds of the programmer mathematician blogs a while ago:
Given a random number generator that returns a real number between zero and one, how many random numbers must be selected, on average, to make their accumulated total greater than one?
Your task is to write a program that answers the question above. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.
Programming Praxis 