>   The probability of two programs initializing [a random seed]
>    within exactly the same window is probably less than lightning striking the 
>    user.

> Not so - it happened to me quite often.  I was starting batch Allegro
> jobs on a dual-processor Sun, using a script.  The random seed was
> inited early in the job, and often came out the same for both
> processes.  My hypothesis was that the random seed was based on a
> clock that got incremented each 1/60 second, and that both processes
> had to wait for the Lisp image to arrive from the file server, then
> got started within 1/60 second of each other.  This is only a
> hypothesis, but it is a fact that the random seeds were sometimes the
> same.

Actually if you disassemble make-random-state, you will see it calls
GET-UNIVERSAL-TIME, which returns the time in seconds.

Art

-- 
Arthur Flatau                           Texas Microprocessor Division
<amd.com at Arthur.Flatau>                   Advanced Micro Devices
Senior Member of Technical Staff        5900 East Ben White Boulevard
                                        M/S 625 Austin TX 78741