City Skyline and random seeds

Click the image on the left to view the canvas demo. (you need a browser other than Internet Explorer) This generates a random city skyline, which fades from sunset to night time. A way to achieve the effect would have been to generate the buildings, store them and alter their state as we go, but I did it a different way to demonstrate a property of generating scenes with pseudo random numbers. Computers are deterministic so the random numbers are not really random. There are algorithms which can produce a random looking number from another number, and so by using one number to create the next, you can create a random looking sequence. The first number you start with is called a (random) seed. A generator will usually set a seed if you don't specify it, using something kind of random it can get, eg the current time, the id of the process or the temperature of the CPU. Not setting the seed is thus the normal thing to do, as each run of the program will probably be different and things will appear more random. However, by setting the seed you can generate a repeated sequence of numbers. This means that if you have some data that is created by a sequence of random numbers, by setting the seed to the same value, you can re-create it again. This is an incredible CPU/memory trade off, where you can generate infinite complexity with CPU time for a single integer value in the seed! A game in the 1980s called Elite used this technique to generate a huge game world on the tiny computers of the time. The way the demo works is to reset the random seed each frame and then generate everything again using repeated calls to random. The windows have a random value of what time they'll turn on, and if it's past that time, they will be on. This demonstrates how you can change some things in the the repeated calls, but critically the calls to random must be the same sequence, ie don't put calls to random in branches that depend on something that varies each call.