Re: [R] Random number quality

2010-02-06 Thread Thomas Lumley
On Sat, 6 Feb 2010, Patrick Burns wrote: A couple comments. Although pseudo-random numbers were originally used because of necessity rather than choice, there is a definite upside to using them. That upside is that the computations become reproducible if you set the seed first (see 'set.seed')

Re: [R] Random number quality

2010-02-06 Thread Patrick Burns
A couple comments. Although pseudo-random numbers were originally used because of necessity rather than choice, there is a definite upside to using them. That upside is that the computations become reproducible if you set the seed first (see 'set.seed'). I tend to encourage skepticism at pretty

Re: [R] Random number quality

2010-02-05 Thread Daniel Nordlund
> -Original Message- > From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] > On Behalf Of b k > Sent: Friday, February 05, 2010 2:04 PM > To: r-help@r-project.org > Subject: [R] Random number quality > > Hello, > > I'm run

[R] Random number quality

2010-02-05 Thread b k
Hello, I'm running R 2.10.1 on Windows Vista. I'm selecting a random sample of several hundred items out of a larger population of several thousand. I realize there is srswor() in package sampling for exactly this purpose, but as far as I can tell it uses the native PRNG which may or may not be ra