How many distinct values can rnorm return? I assume that rnorm manipulates runif in some way, runif uses the Mersenne Twister, which has a period of 2^19937 - 1. Given that runif returns a 64 bit precision floating point number in [0,1], the actual period of the Mersenne Twister in a finite precision world must be significantly less.
One of the arguments for Monte Carlo over the bootstrap is that for a sample size n the bootstrap can return at most 2^n distinct resamples, however for even for relatively small sample sizes there may be no increase in precision in using Monte Carlo. Phineas Campbell ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
