Issues with seeding a pseudo-random number generator more than once?

Question

I\'ve seen quite a few recommendations for not seeding pseudo-random number generators more than once per execution, but never accompanied by a thorough explanation. Of cour

Answer 1

You can think of random number generation (this is not strictly true implementation-wise any more, but serves as an illustration) as a table of values. If you remember doing any of this stuff in statistics for doing simple random samples, a seed basically tells you what row and column to start at in your big table of random numbers. Reseeding over and over again is simply unnecessary since we can already assume that the numbers are normally distributed already.

There is simply no added benefit to seeding more than once since this should be good enough (depending on the application). If you do need "more" random numbers, there are many methods of random number generation. One case that I can think of is to generate random numbers in a thread-safe manner.

While your solution is acceptable, your numbers will be no more random than seeding it once, globally. srand generally shouldn't belong in a constructor. If you'd like to support random numbers, seed once when the program starts, and forget about it.