I am doing a Monte Carlo simulation; it does 100 trials. Each trial takes 30 seconds. I call rand 2e7 times during each trial. I need uniform random numbers; duplicates are ok. The random numbers are a population to draw from (I am modeling sampling error) and a source for the Perl Cookbook Gausian Random number generator (I am also modeling measurement error) Should I call srand between trials? It seems that 30s is enough time for the source of the seed to change. Will the quality of the random numbers degrade after too many calls (e.g., 2e9 calls?)? I use active perl with win2000 so Math::TrulyRandom is not an option for me.

In reply to Re: srand calls by tenya
in thread srand and seed by hopes

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.