Nothing's lost, really -- you can fix the seed on any method or the
entire suite with:
@Seed("deadbeef")
or whatever seed you desire. I understand Ted's argument very well
because I myself was fixing a test the other day that was sampling
from a random distribution of integers and the quiet assumption was
that "picking N values that will be < M is not really likely because
we pick from a range R where R >> M". Turned out not to be true -- we
did hit a distribution in which that assumption was wrong.
In any case, I'm not really advocating for Mahout to use randomized
testing package, I'm just telling you it's out there and works fairly
well (or so I think :) If you were to reinvent a similar thing then it
may be worth a try, that's all.
Dawid
On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 6:46 PM, Ted Dunning <[email protected]> wrote:
> Yeah... if that is true, then the tests aren't well designed and are too
> picky.
>
> On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 9:24 AM, Sean Owen <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Then it makes fine sense to have the test framework pick a new seed
>> and record it in the logs on every run. Before the above is fixed, it
>> won't do much since those tests will certainly fail on (most?) new
>> seeds.
>>
