From ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk  Thu Jun 10 08:51:17 2004
From: ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk (Prof Brian Ripley)
Date: Thu Jun 10 08:51:22 2004
Subject: [Rd] .Random.seed saved in .RData
In-Reply-To: <40C7A30B.1090103@bankofcanada.ca>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0406100746550.3886-100000@gannet.stats>

On Wed, 9 Jun 2004, Paul Gilbert wrote:

> Is it intentional that the .Random.seed is saved in .RData?  If people 

Yes.  (And it happens in S-PLUS equivalently.)  The idea of saving .RData
is to save the session where it left off, and perhaps go forward in
different ways from the same session, e.g. to stop after 37 more
simulations and examine what happened there.

> run multiple sessions from the same directory they will get the same 
> intial seed setting, which seems a bit dangerous. I don't often save my 
> session nor run two sessions in the same directory, so I have never run 
> it this, but there was a question on r-help where it may have been an issue.

I don't think it was the issue there.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595


[Rd] .Random.seed saved in .RData
Prof Brian Ripley