"Liaw, Andy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> .... As Prof. Dalgaard said (privately) .... Whoops. That wasn't really intended as a private response. Must have mixed up 'F' and 'R' again... Here it goes again: ---- > Might I suggest taking a poll (even though unscientific) of how many people > will be affected by a change in default RNG? My totally arbitrary guess is > very few, if any. > > If I'm not mistaken, Python had only recently changed the default RNG to > Mersenne-Twister. If Python can do it, I should think R can, too, without > too much pain... Well, Python is not a statistical system... However, I'm inclined to agree. However, we'd want to get it right this time, and can we be sure that the other generators are really better? As long as the old behaviour can be reinstated, I see very few applications that could get in serious trouble. Those who have sample output in their books will have greater interest in keeping the printed output in sync with their script output than in having perfect distributions, but RNGkind() and set.seed() should take care of that -- at least until they have to switch compiler or CPU (which BTW would seem to be a point in favour of the inversion method over the other normal generators where differences in rounding can change the *number* of calls to the uniform generator, causing random sequences to diverge. The uniform generators generally work in integer arithmetic, so they are more generally reproducible.) -- O__ ---- Peter Dalgaard Blegdamsvej 3 c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics 2200 Cph. N (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen Denmark Ph: (+45) 35327918 ~~~~~~~~~~ - ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) FAX: (+45) 35327907 ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
