I appreciate your problem, and getting reproducible random generator
results on a parallel system is something to be careful about. However,
I would avoid making it too easy to have a fixed seed. In earlier days
there were mistakes too often made by users inadvertently using the same
seed over and over again (on simple single processor systems), for
example, by reloading a session with the seed set.
Paul
On 12-11-01 08:46 PM, Ivan Popivanov wrote:
Hello,
Have been thinking that sometimes users may want each process to initialize
its random seed with a specific value rather then the current seed. This
could be keyed off depending whether mc.set.seed is logical, preserving the
current behaviour, or numerical, using the value in a call to set.seed.
Does this make sense?
If you wonder how I came up with the idea: I spent a couple of hours
debugging "unstable" results from parallel tuning of svms, which was caused
by the parallel execution. In my case I can simply do the set.seed in the
FUN argument function, but that may not be always the case.
Ivan
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