Re: [bongo-devel] 'Random' function failing to be random

[Daniel Brockman]

Hi Anthony,

> I ran Emacs three times in "full random" mode today and noticed the
> selection of tracks was exactly the same in all cases (for more than
> 20 tracks over a playlist of 500 tracks). I normally direct
> random-playback-mode, where the lack of randomness is less obvious.
>
> The first test was done under Emacs 22.0.93 on FreeBSD, and the second
> one under Emacs 22.0.95 on Debian; they were separated by a few hours.
> In addition, Emacs had already run for quite a while before I started
> Bongo. A third test produced the same results.

Thank you for testing this so thoroughly.

> I'm not sure if the pseudo-random generator is supposed to
> be so predictable.

If it isn't randomly seeded when Emacs is started,
that seems pretty strange.

> (random t) gives more random numbers, though it seems to
> be updated only every second or so (this should be good
> enough for Bongo, though).

Probably we shold call `(random t)' only once.  I'm not sure
where, though.  Maybe we should just put it at the top level?

Would that not work?

> Early testing has displayed a non-predictable behaviour in
> full random mode

What is full random mode?

-- 
Daniel Brockman <address@hidden>