Finding which seed resulted in a specific sample
On 13/04/2015 10:12, Isabel Natario wrote:
Hello!
I was wanting to find out which random seed could generate the characters
in the word "love", for example, when I sample with replacement from the
vector of the letters. So I've written the code below:
seed=0
set.seed=0
x<-sample(letters,4,replace=T)
while (sum(x==c("l","o","v","e"))<4){
seed<-seed+1
set.seed=seed
x<-sample(letters,4,replace=T)
}
When I run this code I always get that the final x vector is
c("l","o","v","e"), but afterwards, when I try to set.seed iqual to the
value stored in object "seed" I can never reproduce this vector
c("l","o","v","e"), by doing sample(letters,4,replace=T). Why is that?
Because you never called the function set.seed(): assigning to a
variable of that name does not help.
Also, there are far more values of the underlying seed than can be set
using set.seed(), so this approach will not always work. However
seed <- 0L
set.seed(seed)
x <- sample(letters,4L,replace=T)
while (sum(x == c("l","o","v","e"))<4L){ # I would have used identical()
seed <- seed+1L
set.seed(seed)
x <- sample(letters,4L,replace=T)
}
seed
gave me an answer (543867)
Thank you very much, Isabel Natario -- Dep. Matem?tica Faculdade de Ci?ncias e Tecnologia Universidade Nova de Lisboa 2829-516 Caparica, Portugal icn at fct.unl.pt
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford 1 South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3TG, UK