justin bennett

I know that random and urn can be seeded from a number dependent on the time since system start-up (seed 0) but I'm working on something that will start-up at the same time every day, and various parts of the program will be triggered at fixed times. This suggests that theoretically I could get the same sequence of events happening every day. << or is this extremely unlikely?>>

To avoid this i just thought of generating the seed from sampling a piece of incoming audio (microphone) - remembering that some computer (atari1040ST?) used to provide random numbers by sampling some noisy piece of circuitry -

is there a simpler, cooler way to do this? do anyones externals generate random seeds in a different way?

- i looked in the archives but people seemed to be more interested in repeating a random sequence of events!

random-seeds

you could use a prime number generatorr... i.e. tap.prime

or use the output of the object itself multiplied by the cpuclock ?

I was just about to say that I can't see why either of your suggestions would make it more random. but now it suddenly dawns on me while typing: you're right about the system clock because of course the date component is different every day.

afaik computers report time since startup in ticks (1/60th of a second), so that would be unlikely, or at least unlikely to where the sequence might repeat once or twice a year, which you would be highly unlikely to notice. Personally I use the julian date&time.

afaik computers report time since startup in ticks (1/60th of a second), so that would be unlikely, or at least unlikely to where the sequence might repeat once or twice a year, which you would be highly unlikely to notice.    Personally I use the julian date&time.


yeah, once or twice a year no-one is going to notice!

Right now i'm making a seed by mangling the current date into

yeah, once or twice a year no-one is going to notice!
Right now i'm making a seed by mangling the current date into
a useful number. justin.


maybe someone should modify the date + time object to accept the commands julian / orthodox / chinese / jewish / islamic / mayan / etc... in the interests of temporal diversity. ok, someone has probably done it already!

maybe someone should modify the date + time object to accept the commands julian / orthodox / chinese / jewish / islamic / mayan / etc...  in the interests of temporal diversity. ok, someone has probably done it already!


On around May 10, 2006, at 13:28, justin bennett said something like:

>is there a simpler, cooler way to do this? do anyones >externals generate random seeds in a different way?

The entire suite of Litter Power RNGs base their seed on multiple items drawn from the OS that will not repeat themselves. Ever. They also use an industrial-strength random number generator, rather than the Linear Congruence generator used by random and urn.

If you're seriously interested in random numbers, you owe it to yourself to take a look at Litter Power. The Starter Pack is free. URI below.

Peter Castine (HTML doesn't like the rest of this .signature)

On around May 10, 2006, at 13:28, justin bennett said something like:
>is there a simpler, cooler way to do this? do anyones >externals generate random seeds in a different way?

--------------    http://www.bek.no/~pcastine/Litter/    --------------
Peter Castine (HTML doesn't like the rest of this .signature)
