Question

I’m making an animation in Processing. I have some random points moving randomly and then forming a solid. Since the animation was too slow, I was thinking of saving the frames and then adding them into a movie.

I need to run the same program twice or more, so I’m using the Random class instead of the random() function of Processing, but I dont get the meaning of the seed parameter.

What should I put as seed? Is this random method equally distributed?

Answer 1

It really doesn’t matter what you put as the seed. It’s actually better to leave it parameterless because then it will choose a different seed every time. If you specify a seed explicitly, you will receive random behavior… but the same random behavior every time you run it!

This is because random number generators are not actually, logically random. They are pseudorandom because they are produced with an algorithm. The seed is part of that algorithm. Basically, the algorithm will produce an even distribution of numbers within the range (in fact, so even that PRNG’s are often criticized for not being random enough).

A PRNG can be started from an arbitrary starting state using a seed state. It will always produce the same sequence thereafter when initialized with that state.

From Wikipedia