Simulation: Tortoise & Hare race (srand question)

[nuzzle]

That's not the issue, it's when the program terminates, then I relaunch it again... I get maybe 3-4 repeated sequences if I place srand() inside the functions.

As an experiment you can declare a global variable like say,

unsigned seed = 0;

Then instead of

srand(time(0));

you call

srand(seed++);

in the functions.

Now it appears to be working and in a sense it does. What happens is that you start a new random sequence (the random sequence associated with the current value of the seed variable) before any call to rand() and rand() will always return the first number of that just started sequence.

So now you get a sequence of numbers that are seemingly random, but are they? Not necessarily because you're using the random number generator in a way it wasn't designed for. In order not to abuse the random number generator and risk a low-quality sequence, seed it once at the beginning of the program and then draw numbers from that one sequence throughout the whole of the program.