Robert Church

He is a Person. He's kind of new to Lisp, so he hangs out in #lisp a lot.

This is a utility he wrote:

(defconstant +MAGICCONST+ (/ (* 4 (exp 0.5)) (sqrt 2.0)))

(defun random-normalvariate (mean stddev)
  (let* ((u1 (random 1.0))
         (u2 (random 1.0))
         (z (/ (* +MAGICCONST+ (- u1 0.5)) u2))
         (zz (/ (* z z) 4.0)))
    (if (<= zz (- (log u2)))
        (+ mean (* z stddev))
      (random-normalvariate mean stddev))))

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