Re: Random Seed question

[glen e. p. ropella]

At 12:46 PM 1/31/00 -0500, Miles Parker wrote:
> I think some kind of timestamp is just fine for a seed. In general, I'd be 
> a little hesitiant and too lazy anyway to use RNGs to generate seed for 
> other RNGs. In effect, you're just streaming two RNGs together,and that 
> might just give you unexpected correlations/artifacts. A well designed RNG 
> should be able to take an arbitrary (not strongly coorelated) seed and 
> give you PRNs. Otherwise, what good is it?

Hey guys, you should take a long look at Swarm's random library.
Many of these issues are already addressed in what Sven's done.
He put in the ability to "seed" or initialize the state of
PRNs with normal integers, which is not a trivial task.  And
there's a difference between "seeding" a generator and "freezing
and thawing" a generator, which is also addressed in our library.

>  Now, if I was really industrious, I'd just hook the whole thing up to a 
> lava-lamp true RN server, but I'm not. :-)

Yep!  You should hook up a java client that takes numbers
from random.org. Or buy a real generator... you should be
able to get one for under a thousand bucks.

glen

--
glen e. p. ropella =><= Feeding the hamster wheel.  Hail Eris!
Home: http://www.swarm.com/gepr                (505) 424-0448
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