Question

This is actually not as simple as I first thought.

In the absence of a hardware RNG, what is the best way to seed a Mersenne Twister?

Or should I say, what is an acceptable way to seed a a Mersenne Twister RNG that is used to generate UUID’s?

Answer 1

There is a nice discussion of pseudo-random number generators here including a section on the proper seeding of PRNGs (see rule 3), which uses md5sum and /dev/random or /dev/urandom to generate seeds.

This also includes a number of PRNG alogrithms which are a lot easier to code up (< 10 lines of code) than the MT but are arguably just as good (long periods and pass all of the Dieharder tests for randomness).

Further Reading:

1. Seed std::mt19937 from std::random_device
2. Best way to seed mt19937_64 for Monte Carlo simulations
3. How to obtain (almost) unique system identifier in a cross platform way?