How to use a random number equal another number. (with my source code)

Question

hi, i'm having trouble with this assignment.
3. Determine how many times a die must be rolled in order to
win a prize. (This represents one trial.) Print this value to a
text file.
4. Conduct at least 1,000 trials.
5. Read the data back in from all of the trials.
6. Calculate the average number of times a die must be rolled in order to win a prize.
7. Print the result to the screen
This is what I have so far.
But I get a "int cannot be dereferenced" error
* Write a description of class BottleCapPrize here.
* @author (your name)
* @version (a version number or a date)
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.PrintWriter;
import java.util.Scanner;
import java.util.Random;
import java.io.File;
public class BottleCapPrize
public static void main (String [ ] args) throws IOException
PrintWriter outFile = new PrintWriter(new File("bah.txt"));
Random randomGenerator = new Random();
int random = randomGenerator.nextInt(5);
int count = 0;
for (int loop = 1; loop <= 1000; loop++)
if(random.equals("3"))
outFile.println("Congratulations, both pairs matched.");
count++;
outFile.close ( );
}

Answer 1

And the random generator can only choose a 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5. This is then randomly chosen 1000 times like 400 2s and 200 5s for example.I think you have still to appreciate that the task is not to roll a dice 1000 times and see how many of each number you get.
Tackle it one step at a time:
3. A - Determine how many times a die must be rolled in order to win a prize. (This represents one trial.)
B - Print this value to a text file.
Even the first part of the problem can be broken down into two parts. I strongly suggest to get step 3A working correctly before you move any further. Notice that this step does not involve 1000 rolls of the dice. Rather it asks you to roll the dice as many times as needed until you get a three. Start there: write a method that does no more than report the number of times it had to roll the dice in order to get a three.
import java.util.Random;
public class BottleCapPrize
    public static void main (String [ ] args) throws IOException
        Random randomGenerator = new Random();
        int count = 0;
         * Your code here.
         * At the end of it count should be equal to the number of
         * dice rolls it took to get a three.
        System.out.println("It took " + count + "dice rolls to get a three");
}Once you have this method working correctly - that is you run it lots of times and it agrees with what you find experimentally with an actual dice - then you can move on to saving this result to a file (step 3B). The steps of the assignment provide a framework that makes sense - follow them one at a time.
but only thing is that the random number is all a certain number.That's a fairly major defect in a randomly generated number ;). Read the API documentation for the [nextInt(n)|http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/Random.html#nextInt(int)] method. It should be clear that this is the method that randomly generates a number. So if you want lots of randomly generated numbers (rather than one randomly generated number lots of times) then you have to call this method lots of times. A call to nextInt(n) is the programming equivalent to rolling a dice.