On 2010-Sep-06 21:29:35 +0100, "Dr. David Kirkby" <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: >I would be very weary of any random number generator that claims to be a good >source of random numbers if the output differs by platform or compilation >mode.
It depends what you mean by "differs". For "real" random numbers, you can only discuss different statistical properties of the sequences because the actual sequencee of numbers cannot be predicted or repeated. For pseudo-random sequences, you can additionally talk about the actual sequence of numbers returned by the rng. The documentation for most rng's talks about sequences being repeatable by calling an initialisation function with the same seed but generally does not state the scope of the repeatability - so actual sequences generated by a specific seed could potentially vary on different platforms. I would suggest that the bigger problem is that the GAP doctest relies on a specific sequence of random numbers being used by GAP but does not control or test the actual sequence of random numbers. -- Peter Jeremy
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