Randomness

Finally, Python has many useful modules that we can use. Specially in this lesson, we will learn how to import and use the random module to randomly choose an integer within a bound. You’ll need this for the challenge problems this week.

To begin using any modules, you will need an import statement to load the module. All import statements should be at the beginning of your Python file. In this case, you will need to add the statement import random at the beginning of your Python file to load the definitions from the random module. You can access the definitions by writing random.<NAME>.

To randomly choose a number within a bound, you can use random.randint(start,end) which returns some randomly picked integer N where start <= N and N <= end, i.e., inclusive on both.

Below is an example of importing and using random.randint(). Notice that the first statement is import random. Since we provided the bounds 1 and 10 to r``andom.randint()``, random_num will be any number between 1 to 10. Try running this code multiple times to confirm that different numbers between 1 and 10 are printed each time.