[SciPy-dev] random.set_state also in need of EXPERT attention

[David Goldsmith]

--- On Tue, 7/28/09, Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com> wrote:

> Goldsmith<d_l_goldsmith at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> >
> NR is old and stodgy. They don't cover the state-of-the-art
> for many arts. Ignore them.

Understood.  (Still, I'm looking at the 2007 edition - very disappointing.  Well, at least I know now not to invest my money in a copy for myself.)

> What "expert attention" is required?

Quoting Ralf from the Discussion section: "[random.set_state] needs some expert explanation of what the tuple elements mean, and an example of how to use this function to modify the generator state in a meaningful way. [later] [Matsumoto/Nishimura, 1997] is reasonably clear, there's a link to it on the Wikipedia page. I think it will only give you elements 2 and 3 though, 4 and 5 were added later in the implementation and I guess are for some of the distributions in the random module. [Perhaps irrelevant if one doesn't need to decipher the code to write an intelligible docstring] The other difficulty is the Pyrex/Cython source, a bit harder to read than plain Python."  

DG

> 
> -- 
> Robert Kern
> 
> "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma,
> a harmless
> enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to
> interpret it as
> though it had an underlying truth."
>   -- Umberto Eco
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