[R] random number generator?

ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Wed Jan 29 20:56:03 CET 2003


On Wed, 29 Jan 2003, Paul Gilbert wrote:

> If reworking the RNG mechanism is considered seriously (and I am not advocating
> that), I suggest:
> 
> 1/ There should be a simple mechanism for keeping track of and resetting all the
> information to generate random numbers, that is, seed, uniform generator, and
> transformations. (I have a package, which I intend to distribute shortly, that
> does this for normal distributions and might form a basis for this mechanism. It
> was previously part of my syskern package in dse, and so the mechanism has been
> fairly well tested over several years.)

That's what RNGkind and set.seed do, and have done for a long time.
The information is also stored in .Random.seed, but few users would record 
that (and it does not exist until the first RNG is used).

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at 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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595




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