From: Bob Showalter <bob_showalter@...>
Date: 2005-10-18T00:44:28+09:00
Subject: Re: [QUIZ] Lost Cities (#51)

Daniel Sheppard wrote:
> Just had 10 minutes to look at this, and created a quick test harness to
> compare players before I go poking around trying to figure out what kind
> of logic to use.

OK, one more minor glitch with the harness. The random number seeding 
doesn't work correctly. I get the exact same deck with every game.

> seeds = Array.new(count) { rand }
> 
> play_proc = lambda do |players|
>     p "Playing #{players.inspect}"
>     players.map! { |x| x.new }
>     seeds.each do |seed|
>         srand(seed)

seeds is intialized with a list of nubers 0 <= n < 1. These are then 
later passed to Kernel.srand. However, srand's argument is converted 
using to_i, so all these calls are equivalent to srand(0).

My fix is:

   seeds = Array.new(count) { rand(1 << (8 * 1.size))}

I'm trying to generate random seeds over the range of a Fixnum. Is there 
a more appropriate way to do that?