correct use of random seed in reading a text file

Question

Hi,

1. I am stuck in my program. i tried to set a random seed so i can get same values every time i run the program but i don't think i did it right as all my values in the program are now same...

2. I also want to read into a file and print the 10th char in that file but i don't know how to do so correctly. can someone show me how to pls?

Example, i set seed and randomly read into a text file and print the 10th character and keep printing characters until eof....

but when i printed the output, i noticed that all characters were same.

Answer 1

Hi, @Flygen,

Seeding a pseudo-random number generator gives it its first "previous" value. Each seed value will correspond to a sequence of generated values for a given random number generator. That is, if you provide the same seed twice, you get the same sequence of numbers twice.

Generally, you want to seed your random number generator with some value that will change each execution of the program. For instance, the current time is a frequently-used seed. The reason why this doesn't happen automatically is so that if you want, you can provide a specific seed to get a known sequence of numbers.

The random module uses the seed value as a base to generate a random number. if seed value is not present it takes system current time. if you provide the same seed value before generating random data it will produce the same data.

Suppose you generate 10 values, all these values won't be stored, the last value it generated will be stored because that value will work as the seed for the next number.

Use the above code to see a repeated output for yourself

import random

for i in range(2):
    random.seed(10)
    for i in range(20):
        print(random.random())
    print()

Comments

Thank you for explaining

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