This GitHub issue, although lengthy, discusses some of the technical
difficulties associated with pulling from the random stream. I've linked to
a comment from Martin that discusses this in particular, but there's other
good stuff in the rest of the issue.
https://github.com/Bioconductor/BiocParallel/pull/140#issuecomment-921627153
-Spencer
On Fri, Nov 26, 2021, 10:41 PM Ellis Patrick <ellis.patrick at sydney.edu.au>
wrote:
Hi All,
Sorry I'm not an advanced user. What is the disadvantage of pulling the
default from .Random.seed? As a non-advanced user it took me way too long
to figure out that set.seed() doesn't work.
Thanks,
Ellis
-----Original Message-----
From: Bioc-devel <bioc-devel-bounces at r-project.org> On Behalf Of Spencer
Nystrom
Sent: Saturday, 27 November 2021 2:15 PM
To: Dario Strbenac <dstr7320 at uni.sydney.edu.au>
Cc: bioc-devel at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [Bioc-devel] bpparam Non-deterministic Default
I agree with Martin. I think it is worse for beginners to falsely believe
their results are deterministic when they are not. This sounds like a
problem that should be solved with documentation and maybe even examples
setting the RNG seed manually.
I also worry about advanced users and pollution of RNG seed global state
by having packages assign their own seed. Just sounds like a mess for
little gain.
-Spencer
On Fri, Nov 26, 2021, 7:00 PM Dario Strbenac via Bioc-devel <
bioc-devel at r-project.org> wrote:
Hello,
Might it instead made possible to set an RNGseed value by specifying
one to bpparam but still get the automated back-end selection, so that
it could easily be set to a particular value in an R package?
--------------------------------------
Dario Strbenac
University of Sydney
Camperdown NSW 2050
Australia