You can also seed the Mersenne Twister with a table of seeds, rather than a single number.
This is because, although the MT generator has a period of 2^19937-1 (that is, the number of iterations before it repeats itself), the initial seeding is only a single number of 2^32 bits.
Thus there are effectively only 2^32 (4294967296) possible starting states for the generator.
However by initialising with an array of seeds you can effectively seed the generator to many different states.
The restrictions on using the array of seeds are:
* It only applies to Lua
* The seeds must be numbers (or convertible to numbers)
* There must be at least one number
* They must be an ordinary Lua vector-style table. That is, the key of the first seed is 1, the key of the second is 2, and so on.
* The seed numbers should be integers in the range 0 to 4294967296
Example:
t = { 1234, 5678, 9876, 5432 }
MtSrand (t) -- seed with table of seeds
MtSrand (8888) -- seed with single seed
The MT internal state consists of a vector of 624 32-bit numbers.
You can supply any size table, if it is less than 624 entries, effectively the ones you supply are repeated through the state table.
If you supply more they will be XOR'd with the earlier values. Probably 624 numbers is the maximum useful amount you can supply.