Is continuously seeding a random number generator performance intensive?

[monarch_dodra]

On Friday, 3 January 2014 at 17:41:48 UTC, Jeroen Bollen wrote:
> On Friday, 3 January 2014 at 13:42:19 UTC, monarch_dodra wrote:
>> On Friday, 3 January 2014 at 13:30:09 UTC, Jeroen Bollen wrote:
>>> I already considered this, but the problem is, I need to 
>>> smoothen the noise, and to do that I need all surrounding 
>>> 'checkpoints' too. This means that it'll have to load in 5 at 
>>> a time.
>>
>> I don't see that as a problem. Just because you can load 
>> sub-regions at once, doesn't mean you are limited to only 
>> loading one at a time.
>
> That still means that out of 5 million pixels loaded, only 1 
> million 4 thousand will be used. I guess I can recycle them 
> though.

You could also do a "subdivision" approach:

First, a table that contains seeds for 1Kx1K blocks... However 
each seed is designed to seed 10000 new seeds, to generate 10x10 
blocks (for example).

This way, you can first load your big 1Kx1K block, and then 400 
10x10 blocks. Seems reasonable to me.

I don't know exactly how big your data is, so your mileage may 
vary. Depending on your algorithm, you may have to adapt the 
numbers, or even amount of subdivisions.