There seems to be some mythology around the use of mt19937, specifically that once seeded 'some' number of bits produced by the generator should be ignored so as to have only as near as is possible to pseudo randomness.
Examples of code I've seen are as follows:
boost::mt19937::result_type seed = 1234567; //taken from some entropy pool etc
boost::mt19937 prng(seed);
boost::uniform_int<unsigned int> dist(0,1000);
boost::variate_generator<boost::mt19937&,boost::uniform_int<unsigned int> > generator(prng,dist);
unsigned int skip = 10000;
while (skip--)
{
generator();
}
//now begin using for real.
....
My questions are:
Is this myth or is there some truth to it all?
If it's something viable, how many bits should be ignored? as the numbers I've seen
seem to be arbitrary