Hi Check out the javadoc for Evolve.java The basic Evolve class has a main() loop with a simple job iteration facility. If you'd like to run the evolutionary system four times, each with a different random seed, you might do: java ec.Evolve -file parameter_file -p jobs=4 Here, Evolve will run the first time with the random seed equal to whatever's specified in your file, then job#2 will be run with the seed + 1, job#3 with the seed + 2, and job#4 with the seed + 3. If you have multiple seeds, ECJ will try to make sure they're all different even across jobs by adding the job number * numberOfSeeds to each of them. This means that if you're doing multiple jobs with multiple seeds, you should probably set seed.0 to x, seed.1 to x+1, seed.2 to x+2, etc. for best results. It also works if seed.0 is x, seed.1 is y (a number much bigger than x), seed.2 is z (a number much bigger than y) etc. If you set seed.0=time etc. for multiple jobs, the values of each seed will be set to the current time that the job starts plus the job number * numberOfSeeds. As current time always goes up, this shouldn't be an issue. However it's theoretically possible that if you checkpoint and restart on another system with a clock set back in time, you could get the same seed in a later job. Gabriel On Wed, 16 Jan 2008, Loretta Macklem wrote: > Hi, > > I am working with ECJ and I have made a shell script to do 30 runs in a row. > I am running into a seeding issue. It is always using the same seed. Is > there a way to set the seed to use a random number? > > Thanks, > >