sjwhitworth
Randomness Algorithms
Just wanted to bring up one minor bug and the ask about unseeded random number generation in Go.
There was a minor implementation bug in base/instances.go in regards to the Shuffle method on Instances that causes it to create a non-uniform distribution of shuffle permutations. I'll have it fixed with the correct Fisher-Yates algorithm and submit a pull request soon.
Another thing that came to my attention is that our libraries do not seed the math/rand generators. I'm not sure if this lack of seeding was a desired feature. As Go's rand package uses a fixed seed, behavior between runs is currently deterministic. Perhaps we could make it a convention to seed in our packages' init() function?
I'm still open to random seeding, but the issue is 1) finding a seed source that's genuinely random and 2) once you've found a random seed source, why not use it for all your randomness?