One way to avoid this problem is to round each value "y" upwards with probability equal to its fraction, and round it downwards with the complement of that probability. For example, the number 23.17 would be rounded up to 24 with probability 0.17, and down to 23 with probability 1 - 0.17 = 0.83. (This is equivalent to rounding down "y" + "s", where "s" is a random number uniformly distributed between 0 and 1.) With this special rounding, known as dithering, the sudden steps get replaced by a less objectionable noise, and even small variations in the original signal will be preserved to some extent. Like the stochastic approach to tie-breaking, dithering has no bias: if all fraction values are equally likely, rounding up by a certain amount is as likely as rounding down by that same amount; and the same is true for the sum of several rounded numbers. On the other hand, dithering introduces a random component in the result, much greater than that of stochastic tie-breaking.