Re: picking a new random seed

Charles Brenner wrote:
> When doing Monte Carlo simulations, it may be uninteresting to redo
> the same ones every time the workspace is loaded. As a crude method to
> avoid reusing the same random number sequence, I wrote a loop to run
> for one second generating a random number each time. To my surprise
> the number of iterations in a second shows very little variation --
> 85% of 1-second trials ran the same number of iterations hence ended
> with the same random seed. Also, that number was quite small. (APL
> +DOS: It was 814 but I did also advance a counter in the loop.)
> 
> I guess it would be better just to read the system clock. At 100 tics
> per second, there are as many tics in a year as the number of valid
> values for []RL.

If you really care, you probably want to check out whatever generator 
you use with various tests. There are numerous references on the web, 
for instance

http://www.math.utah.edu/~pa/Random/Random.html
http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/toolkit/rng/index.html

Sam