In addition to issues with reproducibility, think of all of the unit tests that would break!
On Sun, Sep 7, 2014 at 3:51 PM, Sturla Molden <sturla.mol...@gmail.com> wrote: > "James A. Bednar" <jbed...@inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote: > > > Please don't ever, ever break the sequence of numpy's random numbers! > > Please! We have put a lot of effort into being able to reproduce our > > published work exactly, > > Jup, it cannot be understated how important this is for reproducibility of > published research. Thus from a scientific standpoint it is important that > random numbers are not random. Some might think that it's just important > that they are as "random as possible", but reproducibility is just as > essential to stochastic simulations. This is also why parallel random > number generators and parallel stochastic algorithms are so hard to > program, because the operating systems' scheduler can easily break the > reproducibility. I think we could add new generators to NumPy though, > perhaps with a keyword to control the algorithm (defaulting to the current > Mersenne Twister). A particular candidate I think we should consider is the > DCMT, which is exceptionally good for parallel algorithms (the DCMT code is > now BSD licensed, it used to be LGPL). Because of the way randomkit it > written, it is very easy to plug-in different generators. > > Sturla > > _______________________________________________ > NumPy-Discussion mailing list > NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org > http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion >
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