Danny Yoo wrote: > > On Thu, 2 Feb 2006, kevin parks wrote: > > >>Danny (hope you are good!) & co, >> >>I see that biz about random.seed()... but in the absence of setting that >>... does it just grab a value from the system clock? > > > Yes. Here's what the documentation says officially: > > """current system time is also used to initialize the generator when the > module is first imported"""
As of Python 2.4, random.seed() will attempt to use os.urandom() to initialize the seed; if that is not available it uses the system time. >>Is there a way to just let it generate it's usual, known seed... but >>then observe what that is in case you get an especially good run of >>data? > > > We can call seed() explicitely using system time then when we start using > the random module, and if the results are interesting, we report that > initial seed value too. That way, by knowing the initial conditions, we > can reproduce the results. Here is the code from random.py that initializes the seed (a): try: a = long(_hexlify(_urandom(16)), 16) except NotImplementedError: import time a = long(time.time() * 256) # use fractional seconds Kent _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor