Basically I am creating a grid and plotting points on it, and no two points can be on the exact same place [(3,4) is different than (4,3)]. The y coordinates have to be within 2 and 7 (so 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) and x coordinates have to be within 1 and 7. I have a getRandom function (which can be seen below) which generates a random number between a min and max range. Here is what I have so far.
var xposition = [];
var yposition = [];
var yShouldBeDifferentThan = []
function placeRandom() {
for (s=0; s<xposition.length ; s++ ) {
if (xposition[s] == x) { // loops through all numbers in xposition and sees if the generated x is similar to an existing x
yShouldBeDifferentThan.push(yposition[s]); //puts the corresponding y coordinate into an array.
for (r=0; r<yShouldBeDifferentThan.length; r++) {
while (y == yShouldBeDifferentThan[r]) {
y = getRandom(2,7);
}
}
}
}
xposition.push(x);
yposition.push(y);
}
The problem with this is, if
xposition = [1, 5, 5, 7, 5, 5]
yposition = [1, 3, 7, 2, 3, 6]
yShouldBeDifferentThan = [3, 7, 3, 6]
First, it will generate a random number different thah 3, say 6. Then (I think) it will see: 6 == 7
? It doesn't. 6 == 3
? It doesn't. 6 == 6? It does, so generate a random number different than 6. This is where the problem comes, it might generate the number 3. My getRandom
function is the following:
function getRandom(min, max) {
return min + Math.floor(Math.random() * (max - min + 1));
}
I was thinking making the getRandom
function such that I can exclude numbers as well if I want, but I don't know how to do this. If I can get it to exclude numbers, than in the last while loop of the placeRandom
function, maybe I can do something like:
y = getRandom(2,7) // excluding all numbers which already exist in the ShouldBeDifferentThan array
Also, note that I cannot use the indexOf
method since I am using Internet Explorer 8.