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[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #53299] Several rand/randn bugs with state/see


From: Rik
Subject: [Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #53299] Several rand/randn bugs with state/seed behavior.
Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2018 08:21:37 -0500 (EST)
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:55.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/55.0

Follow-up Comment #17, bug #53299 (project octave):

I would say that a first step would be to actually undocument the "seed"
generator in the individual randXXX functions.  If the feature is unknown to
programmers, it won't get used.

The next step is to collect the information about the "seed" generator and put
it in a subheading of the manual, along with the warning that this is all
subject to deprecation and shouldn't be used in any new code and that you
might get strange results.

I doubt we can implement an API on top of the "state" generators to mimic
"seed" generators.  For most people, it is true, they don't care too much
about the generator as long as their results are random.  But I have have been
in design situations where the exact random values in the exact order
encountered previously were desired.  The only way to guarantee that, it would
seem, would be to keep the "seed" generator implementation.

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