Bruce Southey wrote:
From a different view, you need to be very careful with your (pseudo)random number generator with that many samples. These have a tendency to repeat so your random number stream is no longer random. See the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_generator
If I recall correctly, the Python random number generator is a Mersenne twister but ranlib is not and so prone to the mentioned problems. I do not know if SciPy adds any other generators.
numpy.random uses the Mersenne Twister. RANLIB is dead! Long live MT19937! -- Robert Kern robert.kern@gmail.com "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." -- Umberto Eco