On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 12:09 PM, Robert Kern <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 14:05, Barry Wark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> I'm just about to embark on a long-term research project and was >> planning to use numpy.random to generate stimuli for our experiments. >> We plan to store only the parameters and RandomState seed for each >> stimulus and I'm concerned about stability of the API in the long >> term: will the parameters and random seed we store now work with >> future versions of numpy.random? > > It should. But just in case, make sure you explicitly instantiate > RandomState objects instead of using the functions in numpy.random. > That way, should we need to fix some bug that might change the > results, you can always pull out the current mtrand code and use it > independently.
That is our working plan, as well as to record the numpy.__version__ which was used to generate the original stimulus. Thanks for the confirmation. On a side note, this seems like a potentially big issue for many scientific users. Perhaps making a policy of keeping incompatible revisions to RandomState noted in its documentation (if they ever come up) would be useful. Even better, a module function or class method that returns an instance of RandomState as it was at a particular numpy version: r = numpy.random.RandomState.from_version(my_numpy_version, seed=None) Hmm. Sounds like a bit of work. I'll give it a go, if you think this is a valuable approach. > >> I think I recall that there was a >> change in the random seed format some time around numpy 1.0. > > I don't think I changed it after 1.0. Before 1.0, we explicitly warned > people about API instability. I believe you. We've been developing this app since before numpy 1.0, so I'm sure the issue cropped up from data generated pre-1.0. > > -- > Robert Kern > > "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless > enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as > though it had an underlying truth." > -- Umberto Eco > _______________________________________________ > Numpy-discussion mailing list > [email protected] > http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion > _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list [email protected] http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
