Peter (Dimov),

It depends on your platform. /dev/urandom on Linux and possibly other Unixes, encapsulated by boost::random_device; CryptGenRandom on Windows.

Pardon? TIA, --Hossein __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - What will yours do? http://my.yahoo.com

Paul (D),

Your question was "how do I obtain a good random seed". If you need high quality randomness that is hard to predict, you need a source of entropy, that is, a "real" random number generator. On Linux such an entropy source is available as the /dev/urandom device, which you can read as an ordinary file. You can pass a boost::random_device to the constructor of your engine so it can seed itself from /dev/urandom.

On Windows there is no /dev/urandom, but you can generate a high-quality random seed with CryptGenRandom. This function uses a number of essentially random values in the Windows kernel as an entropy source.

To be clear enough, I'm using Dev-C++ under windows. AFAIK, it uses GCC (3.3.1) and does some sort of simulation. What then? (Please :D)

Of course if time(0) meets your needs, go for it. :-)

Hmmm... Not sure. Let me test it. And a question about portability. Is portable in C++? TIA, --Hossein __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com