Talk:Ziggurat algorithm

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Diagram needed

It is requested that a diagram or diagrams illustrating to illustrate the distribution curve and the eponymous ziggurat overlay be included in this article to improve its quality. Specific illustrations, plots or diagrams can be requested at the Graphic Lab. Please replace this template with a more specific media request template where possible.
For more information, refer to discussion on this page and/or the listing at Wikipedia:Requested images.

Basically, something like Fig. 1 on p.2 of Marsaglia's paper, or Fig. 5 from the Thomas et al. paper (linked from article References). An improvement would be to add labels "y₀", "y₁", etc. along the y-axis and "x₀", "x₁", etc. above the points.

Without that picture, the best wording is awfully hard to follow.

For a normal distribution, the function to plot is y = y^-x²/2, and the 8-layer Ziggurat points on it are

x[0] = 2.3383716982472527044692   y[0] = 0.0649595117330380202104
x[1] = 1.9819049364005106693290   y[1] = 0.1402998180884519367696
x[2] = 1.7165081257767795707347   y[2] = 0.2291908828832851165061
x[3] = 1.4853586756432938545359   y[3] = 0.3318257830466926345376
x[4] = 1.2629701985308330330774   y[4] = 0.4504325835506035839847
x[5] = 1.0273863717802284625238   y[5] = 0.5899241094185249870813
x[6] = 0.7383689179764494421219   y[6] = 0.7614016031422429793942
x[7] = 0.0000000000000000000000   y[7] = 1.0000000000000000003253

71.41.210.146 16:33, 19 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]