FAQ: Intro to Built-in PHP Functions - Generating Random Numbers

This community-built FAQ covers the “Generating Random Numbers” exercise from the lesson “Intro to Built-in PHP Functions”.

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This exercise can be found in the following Codecademy content:

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FAQs on the exercise Generating Random Numbers

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Hi, in what situation do we usually need to generate random number, can you give more example?

Hi, I kept seeing “PHP quirks” in the PHP course, what are they really is?

Hi, why “echo getrandmax()” produce a maximum number up to 2147483647 and not higher?

The maximum number produced by getrandmax() in PHP, which is 2147483647, corresponds to the maximum value of a signed 32-bit integer. This is because many PHP installations use a 32-bit version, where integers are represented using 32 bits, and the highest positive integer that can be represented in such a system is 2147483647.

Random numbers are essential in games for generating unpredictable outcomes, such as rolling dice, shuffling cards, or determining the behavior of non-player characters. In gambling applications, random numbers are often used for simulating chance, ensuring fairness, and determining outcomes.

In A/B testing, where different versions of a product or website are compared to see which performs better, randomization is often used to assign users randomly to different groups.

When you need to select a random subset of data for statistical analysis, research, or machine learning, random numbers can be used to choose random samples from a larger dataset.

And many more fields of studies which you can easily research on from the web…