Re: [gnugo-devel] Patch: new cache part 2

[Gunnar Farneback]

Evan wrote:
> This is actually probably a bad thing to just take for granted.
> Some random number generators are very bad, depending on the OS.  A fairly
> simple solution would be to get a set of good random numbers and hard-code
> them in somewhere.  This would also tend to increase repeatability and
> platform independence,

Um, please take a look at utils/random.[ch]. It was realized years ago
that we didn't stand a chance to get consistent play between platforms
if we tried to rely on builtin random number generators. As far as is
known the generator we have implemented is of very high quality.

> because currently a has collision (same bucket, different hashcode)
> results in dropping a cached entry sometimes; it would be nice to
> have that behavior be repeatable for equal sized caches.

Yes, I think we should start using a fixed seed when populating the
Zobrist random number arrays.

/Gunnar