The results of an election should be repeatable. If there's a seed involved, it needs to be part of the election results, and it needs to be something that can be specified as a starting point when re-running the election computation.
On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 4:22 AM, Daniel Gruno <humbed...@apache.org> wrote: > > > On 2015-04-03 00:13, Greg Stein wrote: >> >> On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 8:51 AM, Daniel Gruno <humbed...@apache.org> wrote: >>> >>> ... >>> - Set the random seed to actually be random now. Setting it to 0 is just >>> bad juju and can be reverse engineered to place candidates in such a way >>> that a tie will always favor candidate X. >>> >> I disagree with this change. This now means you/me could run the report >> and >> get different results. That is even worse than the extreme likelihood >> somebody could rig the vote. > > See r1671014 as a compromise - that way the seed stays the same no matter > how many times you tally, but cannot be determined beforehand. > > With regards, > Daniel. > > >> >> You could simply look at the result as: the algorithm chose it that way. >> It >> happens to use a pseudorandom sequence to make the choice. That decision >> is >> *part* of how the algorithm operates, rather than using a true random >> number. >> >>> ... >> >> Cheers, >> -g >> >
