On Aug 19, 2011, at 10:33 AM, Chris Wright wrote:

> When running the example "Flockers" program without a GUI, the results
> compared to a non-GUI version with the same seed seem to differ
> significantly. More specifically, the positioning of the "dead"  
> flockers
> appears to be the same but those of the live flockers are vastly  
> different
> at the same number of iterations. Both give consistent, but different,
> results each run.



Took me a while to realize what was happening, but it's simple:  the  
GUI version of Flockers uses the random number generator to produce  
the random colors of each flocker! If you change these lines in  
FlockersWithUI.


                     new Color( 128 + state.random.nextInt(128),
                         128 + state.random.nextInt(128),
                         128 + state.random.nextInt(128)),

to...

		   Color.red,

Then the problem goes away.  But of course the flockers are no longer  
pretty.  So that brings up an interesting question: do we want to  
guarantee the same exact result on the GUI versus the command line  
even if the GUI version uses the random number generator?  If this  
isn't a big deal (and it probably isn't) then no.  But if it matters,  
then we'd probably need a separate RNG just for the GUI, which is  
entirely doable  -- we could just build a MersenneTwister and use it,  
for example.  Not a hard thing to add.  But would an additional RNG be  
confusing?

Sean