Random seed behavior

1

Hi,

Currently, the random seed is automatically shuffled when a job is cloned, or when a new job is created, unless it is explicitly altered.

I wonder if it would be possible to optionally (via a preference?) change this behavior, such that when a job is cloned, the random seen is maintained.

The rationale is as follows - when cloning a job, I am generally tweaking parameters - looking for the effect of changing a parameter on the outcome. But if the random seed is changed, I am looking at both the effect of the random seed and the parameter change. So generally when cloning jobs, I would rather the seed was cloned too. For ab initio in particular, the random seed can really make a difference, but I need to remember to manually fix it when cloning jobs.

Cheers
Oli

2 Likes
2

Hi @olibclarke,

Sorry for the delayed response! If you clone the initial job and change the seed to the same as the original job (eg. making it a non-default param), then the seed will be preserved when cloning the cloned job. Do you think that would work for your use case?

Best,
Kye

3

Hi Kye - thanks for the reply! That is what I do - I was just suggesting that the current defaults may not be optimal when screening parameters, and Iā€™m not sure how many users pay attention to the random seed. I suspect that mostly when users are cloning jobs, they are doing to to test the effect of altering parameters, in which case fixing the seed would make sense, but probably I am overlooking something :blush: