Re: Random Seed question

[Theodore C. Belding]

On Mon, 31 Jan 2000, glen e. p. ropella wrote:

> 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.

Hi Glen-
Sven's done great work, and people should take advantage of his library,
if they're using Swarm. 

My point, which others have also said, is simply that you don't *need* to
use something like Sven's library, or Drone, or random.org, or lava lamps,
to get "good" seeds. As Knuth says, any legal seed is fine, as long as you
don't reuse a seed within a set of runs.

The only reasons I can think of why you might *need* to use a more
sophisticated method to choose seeds are if you're doing cryptography, and
(perhaps) if it's required to prove the validity of a statistical test
for your data. 
-Ted

--
Ted Belding                              address@hidden 
University of Michigan Center for the Study of Complex Systems
Homepage: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~streak/
PGP key:  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~streak/pgp-key.html



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