The goal is to create a list of 99 elements. All elements must be 1s or 0s. The first element must be a 1. There must be 7 1s in total. import random import math import time # constants determined through testing generation_constant = 0.96 def generate_candidate(): coin_vector = [] coin_vector.append(1) for i in range(0, 99): random_value = random.random() if (random_value > generation_constant): coin_vector.append(1) else: coin_vector.append(0) return coin_vector def validate_candidate(vector): vector_sum = sum(vector) sum_test = False if (vector_sum == 7): sum_test = True first_slot = vector[0] first_test = False if (first_slot == 1): first_test = True return (sum_test and first_test) vector1 = generate_candidate() while (validate_candidate(vector1) == False): vector1 = generate_candidate() print vector1, sum(vector1), validate_candidate(vector1) Most of the time, the output is correct, saying something like [1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0] 7 True but sometimes, the output is: [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0] 2 False What exactly am I doing wrong?