[Numpy-discussion] Backwards-incompatible improvements to numpy.random.RandomState

[Anne Archibald]

Do we want a deprecation-like approach, so that eventually people who want
replicability will specify versions, and everyone else gets bug fixes and
improvements? This would presumably take several major versions, but it
might avoid people getting unintentionally trapped on this version.

Incidentally, bug fixes are complicated: if a bug fix uses more or fewer
raw random numbers, it breaks repeatability not just for the call that got
fixed but for all successive random number generations.

Anne

On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 5:04 PM <josef.pktd at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 9:08 AM, Alan G Isaac <alan.isaac at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On 5/24/2015 8:47 AM, Ralf Gommers wrote:
>> > Values only change if you leave out the call to seed()
>>
>>
>> OK, but this claim seems to conflict with the following language:
>> "the global RandomState object should use the latest implementation of
>> the methods".
>> I take it that this is what Nathan meant by
>> "I think this is just a bug in the description of the proposal here, not
>> in the proposal itself".
>>
>> So, is the correct phrasing
>> "the global RandomState object should use the latest implementation of
>> the methods, unless explicitly seeded"?
>>
>
> that's how I understand it.
>
> I don't see any problems with the clarified proposal for the use cases
> that I know of.
>
> Can we choose the version also for the global random state, for example to
> fix both version and seed in unit tests, with version > 0?
>
>
> BTW: I would expect that bug fixes are still exempt from backwards
> compatibility.
>
> fixing #5851 should be independent of the version, (without having looked
> at the issue)
>
> (If you need to replicate bugs, then use an old version of a package.)
>
> Josef
>
>
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Alan
>> _______________________________________________
>> NumPy-Discussion mailing list
>> NumPy-Discussion at scipy.org
>> http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
>>
> _______________________________________________
> NumPy-Discussion mailing list
> NumPy-Discussion at scipy.org
> http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/attachments/20150524/b20bb5df/attachment.html>