Lie Ryan wrote:
If you don't care about "repeatability" (which is already extremely difficult in parallel processing even without random number generators), you can just start two PRNG at two distinct states (and probably from two different algorithms)
There's no need for different algorithms, and no problem with repeatability. There exist algorithms with a very long period (on the order of 2*100 or more) for which it's easy to calculate seeds for a set of guaranteed non- overlapping subsequences. http://or.journal.informs.org/cgi/content/abstract/44/5/816 http://or.journal.informs.org/cgi/content/abstract/47/1/159 In these kinds of generator, moving from one state to the next involves multiplying a state vector by a matrix using modulo arithmetic. So you can jump ahead N steps by raising the matrix to the power of N. -- Greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list