On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 7:56 PM, Sturla Molden <sturla.mol...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On 24/05/15 20:04, Nathaniel Smith wrote: > > > I'm not sure what you're envisioning as needing a deprecation cycle? The > > neat thing about random is that we already have a way for users to say > > that they want replicability -- the use of an explicit seed -- > > No, this is not sufficient for random numbers. Random sampling and > ziggurat generators are examples. If we introduce a change (e.g. a > bugfix) that will affect the number of calls to the entropy source, just > setting the seed will in general not be enough to ensure backwards > compatibility. That is e.g. the case with using ziggurat samplers > instead of the current transcendental transforms for normal, exponential > and gamma distributions. While ziggurat is faster (and to my knowledge) > more accurate, it will also make a different number of calls to the > entropy source, and hence the whole sequence will be affected, even if > you do set a random seed.
Please reread the proposal at the top of the thread. -- Robert Kern
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