Tim Attwood <tim### [at] anti-spamcomcastnet> wrote:
> IMO, there's no real need for access to larger seeds...

  There are RNGs and applications for them where larger seeds are needed.

  Someone mentioned encryption, where the seed acts as the encryption key.
Sure, you could always argue "nobody will ever need encryption in POV-Ray".
You could make the same argument about half of POV-Ray's features.

  I'm pretty sure there are things like stochastic simulations where seeds
larger than 2^32 could be useful.

  As I mentioned in another post, it makes little sense to me to stop the
user from accessing the features of the RNG simply because someone can't
think of good uses for them. And I really think that going the old route
of "2^32 random number streams ought to be enough for anybody" is not smart
in the long run.

> for example mersenne twister (MT19937) is seeded from
> a single 32 bit value

  If that's true, then IMO that lessens the usefulness of MT.

  The RNG I'm considering supports very large seeds (up to something like
8192-bit seeds if so configured) and has very high quality and speed.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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