>> I think Bill Dunlap's answer addressed it: the claim appears to be false.
Here is another example where there is randomness that is not due to the seed. On the same machine, the same R binary, but through another interface. First directly in the shell: > sessionInfo() R version 2.13.1 (2011-07-08) Platform: i686-pc-linux-gnu (32-bit) locale: [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=C [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8 [5] LC_MONETARY=C LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8 [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NAME=C [9] LC_ADDRESS=C LC_TELEPHONE=C [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C attached base packages: [1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base > set.seed(123) > print(coef(lm(dist~speed, data=cars)),digits=22) (Intercept) speed -17.579094890510951643137 3.932408759124087715975 # And this is through eclipse (java) > sessionInfo() R version 2.13.1 (2011-07-08) Platform: i686-pc-linux-gnu (32-bit) locale: [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=C [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8 [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8 LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8 [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NAME=en_US.UTF-8 [9] LC_ADDRESS=en_US.UTF-8 LC_TELEPHONE=en_US.UTF-8 [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_US.UTF-8 attached base packages: [1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base other attached packages: [1] rj_0.5.2-1 loaded via a namespace (and not attached): [1] rJava_0.9-1 tools_2.13.1 > set.seed(123) > print(coef(lm(dist~speed, data=cars)),digits=22) (Intercept) speed -17.57909489051087703615 3.93240875912408460735 ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel