What’s the right way to define random product probabilities in Distribution mode?
I was assuming I can just set percentages here (for example 3 products with 33% probability for each), although testing it it does not seem to be the case - it’s giving product S6 each time as the first product.
The probability values don’t need to add up to 1, they are automatically normalized such that the probabilities are relative. So (0.33, 0.33, 0.33) and (1, 1, 1) and (123, 123, 123) are all equivalent.
You getting the same sequence of products between simulations is intended behavior because a sequence of pseudo-random numbers is used to pick the next product that gets created. Those random numbers come from the selected random number stream. This is so that simulations are deterministic, i.e. the simulation results don’t differ between runs which is very important for repeatability and being able to see effects of changes to the simulation from the “random noise”.
However, in practice the random number stream system is kind of broken in VC (currently version 5.0). The streams are shared by all consumers of randomness such as distribution properties, and you can’t really control when new values are pulled which advances the stream and changes all subsequent results. Even things like viewing the distribution property in UI can cause a new value get “pulled”, and it is unclear when the random streams are actually reset to start their sequence over.
There are also several random number streams available which allows isolating some changes from others, but there is no UI to change the random seed for those streams, only API. Changing the seed would allow you to get a different sequence of numbers on demand from the stream and also return to a specific number sequence.
