On Mon, 26 Dec 2011 01:51:30 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote: > On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 1:21 AM, Roy Smith <r...@panix.com> wrote: >> It turns out, I don't really need 20 digits. If I can count on >> >>>>> "%020d" % random.randint(0,999999999999999) >> >> to give me 15-ish digits, that's good enough for my needs and I'll >> probably go with that. Thanks. > > I'd say you can. The information about the Mersenne Twister underlying > the module's functions isn't marked as "CPython Implementation Note", so > I would expect that every Python implementation will provide a minimum > of 53-bit precision. (It does have the feeling of an implementation > detail though; is there a guarantee that two Pythons will generate the > same sequence of numbers from the same seed?)
Yes. http://docs.python.org/dev/library/random.html#notes-on-reproducibility I think that's a new guarantee. Previously, the answer was only yes-ish: in theory, no guarantee was made, but in practice, you could normally rely on it. For example, when the Mersenne Twister became the default random number generator, the old generator, Wichman-Hill, was moved into its own module whrandom (deprecated in 2.4; now gone) for those who needed backwards compatibility. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
