On Monday, 8 February 2016 at 19:46:19 UTC, Joseph Rushton
Wakeling wrote:
[snip]
This might be a stupid idea, but perhaps there's something useful
in it:
Determinism isn't the same thing as "one long chain of numbers
that everybody reads from".
It can be acceptable to seed a set of reasonable pseudo-random
number generators with consecutive integers (indeed seeding
randomly can be dangerous because of the birthday problem). More
generally, any change of the state of the rng in "seed-space"
should produce an output equivalent to taking a sample from the
output distribution.
Can you not have a random number generator make a copy of itself
like this:
struct RNG
{
State state;
static State.ModifierT modifier;
this(this)
{
this.state.alterBy(modifier++);
//recalculate output sample etc...
}
}
Then any time you copy a RNG, the copy is kicked on to a new path
in state-space. Basically we're deterministically re-seeding on
copy.
