Re: [Help-gsl] initializing RNG with an array?

[Peter Johansson]

On 08/06/2014 02:08 AM, Anye Li wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Does anybody know of a way to seed the random number generator with an
> array of data, so that the number of sequences available is limited by
> the size of the state rather than the range of the RNG?  I see
> gsl_rng_memcpy and gsl_rng_fread in the documentation but it seems these
> are for restoring a known good state, not for seeding with unknown data.
> I'm looking for something along the lines of MT19937's init_by_array.
I'm curious what your use case is when this is an actual limitation. 
FWIW, I reckon it's against the idea with gsl_rng as it was design to be 
polymorphic so one can easily replace one generator with another.

Anyway, AFAICS, you can seed set the state with something like

void set_state(gsl_rng* r, void* seed, size_t size)
{
    memcpy(r->state, seed, size);
}

cheers,

--
Peter Johansson