On Sat, 2 May 2009, Saptarshi Guha wrote:
Hello, In ?set.seed I notice that a seed is created from the system time. Thus if two machines were (hypothetically) running for the same time and R was started simultaneously on both, the would have the same seeds (correct?).
Yes. This could in principle be a problem for clusters, though that level of synchronization is unlikely.
I assume reading from /dev/random would be different for both of these machines, so my question is why not use an integer read from /dev/random to create the seed? Would it be a portability issue?
Yes. Most R users probably don't have /dev/random -thomas Thomas Lumley Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics tlum...@u.washington.edu University of Washington, Seattle ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
