Setting the Default RNG Seed in R

How to set the default seed for the RNG behind the runif(), sample() and other command? Well, there are several ways doing that (like setting .Random.seed directly), but as the documentation states, set.seed() is the recommended way to specify seeds.

> ?set.seed
> set.seed(0)
> runif(1,0,1)
[1] 0.8966972
> set.seed(0)
> runif(1,0,1)
[1] 0.8966972

> set.seed(0)
> sample(1:10, 10)
 [1]  9  3 10  5  6  2  4  8  7  1
> sample(1:10, 10)
 [1]  1  2  9  5  3  4  8  6  7 10
> set.seed(0)
> sample(1:10, 10)
 [1]  9  3 10  5  6  2  4  8  7  1
> sample(1:10, 10)
 [1]  1  2  9  5  3  4  8  6  7 10

Further reading

• David Smith's blog post at Revolution Analytics


• > ?set.seed


• > ?runif


• > ?sample