On 21/11/2007, Scott Wheeler <wheeler@kde.org> wrote:

I found the pattern -- I was using "--silent" on Windows.  Windows seems
to use the number of milliseconds since the program started running in
its computation of rand().  If you remove the 1::second => now from the
loop the numbers are in fact random.  Effectively using --silent did
that to my runs (since durations aren't respected then).  All of the
different durations that I tried in your loop seem to produce a
different, repeated sequence.

Ah! Good work!

Assuming the random number generator itself is solid enough for our purposes (sounds safe to me as a assumption, it's not that hard) this could still be fixed by coming up with a per session initial seed for the series, then basing every new one the last permutation right?

Interestingly this;
----------------------------------
Noise n => blackhole;

//avoid generating a zero (perhaps done to avoid clicks, perhaps it's the first of the series?)
ms => now;

<<<n.last()>>>;
----------------------------

.....Will always start with the same number (0.851436) the first time it's run but running it multiple times while keeping the VM alive won't repeat like rand2 will. Sadly that means Noise won't get us a free seed to start with, which is what I was of course hoping for.

Kas.