On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 08:26:12AM -0400, David Lonie wrote: > On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 11:34 PM, Geoffrey Hutchison > <ge...@geoffhutchison.net> wrote: > >> I've always wondered why OBRandom exists -- I would assume that the > >> built in standard random number generators would be decent on each > >> platform? > > > > No, that's not true. In fact, the BSD and Mac "man" pages for rand() say: > > "-- bad random number generator" > > Ah, good to know. It would seem that they'd fix it if they knew it was > bad, especially when something like what Tim has is so easy to > implement! :-) >
yes - its well known the original rand is bad - but now you would use the random function - try man random on Mac etc. ( apparently on linux (Ubuntu) rand is now simply an extension of the random generator) (or you could use the Gnu random number generator library in the GSL - Gnu Scientific Library - if you really wanted serious statistically valid random numbers - the issue is with the better ones is how fast you need numbers - the better the numbers the slower the algorithm - random in linux is specified as 2/3 speed of the original rand library in the man entry) David ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by Make an app they can't live without Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge http://p.sf.net/sfu/RIM-dev2dev _______________________________________________ OpenBabel-Devel mailing list OpenBabel-Devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/openbabel-devel
