Re: bad random numbers

[Mike Miller]

Thanks to John Judge and Bill Lash for clarifying the problem, and thanks
to Bill Lash for writing a patch.

I used to think that incrementing the seed by a small amount did not
increment the first random number by a small amount.  Now I know that I
was mistaken.  Both octave and MATLAB 4 generators prove I was wrong on
this point.  So the suggestion to "warm up" the generator makes sense
to me now.

The use of 'ceil' insted of 'floor' in John Judge's octave code seems to
give the same result I was getting originally.  With floor, numbers
increment in the opposite direction than when ceiling is used.  I don't
know why, but it isn't important.

I think it would be good to have Bill Lash's code incorporated in the
standard octave source.  I'm assuming it does what it's supposed to do and
won't cause problems on other systems.

Thanks for all the pointers!

Mike

-- 
Michael B. Miller
University of Missouri--Columbia
http://taxa.psyc.missouri.edu/~mbmiller/



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