Hi All,
   Ok, seeing I get to visit this question on a regular basis with the National
Guard...

    They do a "percentage based random drug test" every so many months.   It
seems to be based on the last digit of the SSN...If they want 70% they just pick
seven of the 10 digits 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and everyone who's SSN ends in that
number gets to be tested! Oh Joy of Joys hehehe :)

I think Steve is right about just using the RAND() function.... tho I think that
it can produce "reproducable and therefore predictable" results ??

Art "been a while since I had to write a random number generator" Bahrs

>>> Steve Dirickson b894 WestWin <[log in to unmask]> 10/21/97 11:35am
>>>
<<The original posting should probably have said that the selections
"could" change from year to year, as it is theoretically possible to
randomly select the same employees every year.  This is OK although we
need to make sure that the same employee is not selected more than once
in the same year.  I also have been told that there may be COBOL
INTRINSICS that could be used for this.  Is this a possible solution?>>


Again, a truly random selection not only allows a given entry to be
selected twice in a row, but must allow every entry to have the same
selection probability every time the process is run. This means, for
example, that a given employee could be selected five times in a row.
Selecting one employee each time from a list of ten gives odds of
100,000:1 against the five-in-a-row sequence. However, if the probability
is artificially forced to be zero, the system is not random. In fact, it
is explicitly non-random, and using it for something like drug-testing
selection would likely be the basis of a successful court challenge.

As for the method, I'm not a COBOL programmer, but every other language
I've used (C, FORTRAN, BASIC) had a function that returned a
pseudo-random sequence. There's also the 'RAND()' intrinsic in XL.PUB.SYS
(I think that's where it lives); it's documented in the "Compiler
Library/XL" manual (which is packed away at the moment-we're getting
ready to change buildings-so I can't give you a page reference).

Steve