Re: random seeds (was Re: [gnugo-devel] predictability vs. strength)

[Douglas Ridgway]

On Sat, 15 May 2004, Evan Daniel wrote:

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> Douglas Ridgway wrote:
> > There's a tradeoff between predictability and strength. As a way of
> > exploring this, in a quick and dirty way, I [...]
> 
> How did you run the games?  I tried repeating your experiment with
> twogtp.pike as the controller, and realized that for some reason the
> random seeds of the two engines are always the same!  Presumably, this
> significantly reduces the randomness in the games, and the number of
> unique games.

I used twogtp-a, and didn't do anything about seeding. I think it gets
seeded with time(0) somewhere, and so both engines will have the same seed
if started inside the same second. Since they are playing different
sides, I told myself it wasn't a concern. I haven't really looked at
seeding, though.

doug.