Re: Random Seed question

[Theodore C. Belding]

On Mon, 31 Jan 2000, Miles Parker wrote:

> One
> little problem I have is that I use current time in millis, which is a
> pretty big number. Its kind of silly to have to jot down seeds like
> '949340224380' but I'm afraid to simply shrink the number by division or
> modulous or whatever. I was thinking I could just keep the 'little'
> decimal end, in effect mod 10^5 or something. Does this sound ok? Does
> anyone have any otehr nice 'safe' ways to do this while keeping things
> arbitrary?

If you reduce the space of seeds like this, you increase the chance that
you'll re-use a seed and thus have 2 runs with the same stream of
random numbers, if you simply pick the seeds at random or use the
current timestamp.
-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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