astropy/astropy-tutorials

Explain why one should/shouldn't use seed

charmoniumQ opened this issue · 1 comments

tutorials/notebooks/quantities.ipynb says

You shouldn't use the seed function in real science code, but we use it here for example purposes.

I argue the contrary, one should use a seed because it makes the results deterministic and reproducible by others. If you need to search the random space more thoroughly, then search more options within the program, not by running the program multiple times with new seeds.

Why shouldn't use a seed in general? If that is so, why is this particular notebook an exception? Whatever decision we come to, I think the rationale merits being explained in that notebook.

adrn commented

I'm not sure why this tutorial says that! I would agree with you @charmoniumQ, so I think we should just remove this line on our next review of the content. Thanks!