> >Anyway, it's very easy to make a fast PRNG these days. A couple words of caution about hacking PNRG.
Back in the stone age of computing, some mavens from the triple-i movie group cooked up a "galaxy simulator" which generated pictures of spiral galaxies based on a numerical model. The capability to make pictures was rare at the time. The pictures sucked. After lots of hunting for flaws in the model, and tweaking it, the real cause for the poor quality was determined to be that fortran's "random" numbers weren't very good. Substitute a better PRNG, and beautiful pictures emerged. -- On a similar note, working with a UCT robot for a blokus clone at boardspace.net, I found that tiny changes in the way PRNG's were used had measurable effects on the quality of play. Not necessarily better or worse, just different. -- So if you're going to hack the PRNG, you should retain the ability to use a gold standard PRNG instead of your faster-better-cheaper model, and you should use it once in a while, just to be sure you're not introducing hidden flaws. _______________________________________________ Computer-go mailing list Computer-go@computer-go.org http://computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go
