Re: Monte Carlo Hits Again

[brian whatcott <inet@INTELLISYS.NET>]

At 11:51 12/25/99 -0800, Ray Rogoway wrote:
> Finally...An answer to "what good is Physics?"
>
> The instruction sheet sent to me (unrequested) with a freebie on-line
> gambling Casino CD, contains the following sentence:
>
> "The games at Pharaoh's casino are based on true random numbers,
> generated by a Geiger-Müller Tube Detector, which uses the
> unpredictability of background radiation to generate genuinely random
> numbers."
>
> And to think, all this time I've been using my GM Tube to take
> measurements. Do you think that schools will not have to remove their GM
> Tubes because it might encourage gambling during the lab period?
>
> Happy Pre-Millenium
>
> Ray Rogoway


I was surprised to find that an IBM implementation of
Unix (AIX 4.1.5) and Fortran 90 (3.1.3) for risc6000
did not wish to cooperate when a new seed was requested
for the pseudo random initialization of each gene of each
member of a start population for a genetic algorithm
(simple) approach to solving a problem.

As you know, such an algorithm typically optimizes to a single
solution, and for a wide class of problems having multiple
 solutions, one would like to see several of them.

So I used a system call for the time as the seed.
   Very Dartmouth BASIC!










brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net>
Altus OK