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Testing the Reproducibility of Random Numbers in STAN

Sebastian Sauer performs some tests:

Bayes models (using MCMC) build on drawing random numbers. By their very nature, random numbers are random. Unless they are not. As you may know, the random number fuctions in computers are purely deterministic.

However, in practice, some inpredictable behavior may still show up. The reason being simply that two computational environment must – in theory – being exactly identical in order to reproduce the same results. At least identical in every bit that influence random number generation.

Click through for the testbed and code.