Hi William,
If you tale a "snapshot" of the two values, then they probably will be different because the start0 task will have completed more iterations during the pause in the start1 loop. But how are you seeing the values of w0 and w2 anyway, since your program doesn't have any "output" commands (sertxd or flashing a LED, etc)? Note that the PE5 and PE6 simulators behave differently and AFAIK neither is the same as a "real" PICaxe chip!
There are two fundamental issues with the PICaxe "random" routine. Firstly, as expalined above, the PICaxe itself does not have access to any random seed, so the Programmer must "find" one. But putting in an arbitrary fixed value will still produce the same results every time the program runs. Using another starting number (than the 0 to which all variables are initialised) does tend to "hide" the other issue: that the result from "random w0" (in a real chip) mainly involves a single left-shift of the bits, so the result is always either (2 * w0) or (2 * w0 + 1), but truncated to a word (16 bit) value.
If you want a really random value, then you should use a truly random seed (a "touch16,anyadcinputpin,wo" is probably the simplest) and then execute "random w0" more times than there are bits in your required subsequent random number (e.g. four times for a single decimal digit, eight for a byte, etc.).
Cheers, Alan.
