Repeat Galaxies

[dmm]

You have to watch out with random number generators. Some of them stink! (By the way, they're ALL actually pseudo-random. Eventually they repeat. ) Lousy ones will generate a nice sequence of numbers that seems pretty random, but if you keep seeding it and looking at the result, you find that the generator is actually only able to generate a small number of "random" series. The chance that one "random" series will be identical to another "random" series can be quite high if your algorithm stinks badly enough. And it turns out that making a non-lousy one is harder than you'd think it would be.

Is that what happened in this case? NAH! It's a bug!

How do you like my use of emoticons? I just figured it out!

[This message has been edited by dmm (edited 02 November 2000).]