Re: Just how predictable is Lua's random function

[Rici Lake <lua@...>]

On 21-Feb-07, at 12:25 PM, Jeremy Darling wrote:

> Just as the subject says, I'm curious just exactly how predictable the 
> random function is given a known seed.  If I use the same seed on all 
> platforms (Windows, Linux, and Mac) can I expect the next N calls to 
> random to always generate the same values?  This seems to be the case 
> on Windows, but I can't validate it on the other platforms (yet).

Lua uses the standard C library random function, which is 
deterministic. However, it might not be the same implementation on all 
platforms; i.e. you might get a different sequence starting from the 
same seed on a 64-bit platform than on a 32-bit platform (for example), 
or with different C standard library implementations.