From saptarshi.guha at gmail.com  Sun May  3 00:53:17 2009
From: saptarshi.guha at gmail.com (Saptarshi Guha)
Date: Sat, 2 May 2009 18:53:17 -0400
Subject: [Rd] set.seed and /dev/random
Message-ID: <1e7471d50905021553s57857f87gbfcbdabedc006b79@mail.gmail.com>

Hello,
In ?set.seed I notice that a seed is created from the system time.
Thus if two machines were (hypothetically) running for the same time
and R was started simultaneously on both, the would have the same
seeds (correct?).

I assume reading from /dev/random would be different for both of these
machines, so my question is why not use an integer read from
/dev/random to create the seed?

Would it be a portability issue?
I must admit I have very little idea about RNGs, so my question is
possibly very naive.

Thank you
Saptarshi



[Rd] set.seed and /dev/random
Saptarshi Guha