Boost Mersenne Twister: how to seed with more than one value?
- by Eamon Nerbonne
I'm using the boost mt19937 implementation for a simulation.
The simulation needs to be reproducible, and that means storing and potentially reusing the RNG seeds later. I'm using the windows crypto api to generate the seed values because I need an external source for the seeds and not because of any particular guarantees of randomness. The output of any simulation run will have a note including the RNG seed - so the seed needs to be reasonably short. On the other hand, as part of the analysis of the simulation, I'll be comparing several runs - but to be sure that these runs are actually different, I'll need to use different seeds - so the seed needs to be long enough to avoid accidental collisions.
I've determined that 64-bits of seeding should suffice; the chance of a collision will reach 50% after about 2^32 runs - that probability is low enough that the average error caused by it is negligible to me. Using just 32-bits of seed is tricky; the chance of a collision reaches 50% already after 2^16 runs; and that's a little too likely for my tastes.
Unfortunately, the boost implementation either seeds with a full state vector - which is far, far too long - or a single 32-bit unsigned long - which isn't ideal.
How can I seed the generator with more than 32-bits but less than a full state vector? I tried just padding the vector or repeating the seeds to fill the state vector, but even a cursory glance at the results shows that that generates poor results.
