Cool article. A couple of things which might not be obvious to people who haven't used monte carlo simulators in practise. 1) The fact that a prng is weak[1] and that the MC is deterministic given a particular seed is almost always a good thing. You want the thing to be as fast as possible and you're going to run a lot of paths. Secondly you very often need repeated runs to give the same result. For example say you'r…
I seem to be in the minority, but I don’t think you should use a fixed seed in the MC runs you use for decision making. It gives a false sense of the accuracy of process as the answers stay the same. I think a decision maker should be exposed to the effects of the standard error. That said, I know sometimes the point of analysis is more about narrative building than decision making, and changing numbers make it harde…
On the other hand once you're happy with the error bars wrt seeding it is imo useful to have consistency in reporting.