reproducing Box-Muller numbers
On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Paul Gilbert wrote:
Brian
I'll make a call to set.seed clear the saved value. That's all we intend to be reproducible, setting the state by set.seed.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you suggesting that setting .Random.seed directly is not intended to give reproducible results? I presume not, but if so, then set.seed needs better control over the seed (i.e. vector seeds).
Users are not expected to set .Random.seed directly, period. set.seed() sets one of 2^32 separate seeds: why do you need more?
Also, could "user-supplied" be added as an option for normal.kind in RNGkind.
I'm sure the Box-Muller in R is better than my own attempt, but I would like
to
be able to reproduce results I've obtained in the past.
Not very easily, and we are in feature freeze for 1.0.0 now, so not before 1.1.0. It would be easy to patch in your own version, but the difficulty is to add all the protection needed for user-supplied code.
When are you expecting 1.1.0? I can easily patch the version used by my library, but for obvious reasons I would prefer not to post a library that does this. A very large number of my code tests do not work if I cannot reproduce previous rnorm random numbers.
1.1.0 is not yet announced, but the feature freeze for 1.0.0 has been for several weeks (on developer.r-project.org). I presume the numbers you want to reproduce were not standard R before?
Brian D. Ripley, ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272860 (secr) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-devel mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-devel-request@stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._