CosmoCoffee

Dear Antony et al.,

I have a basic question concerning priors (Gaussian or flat) on parameters in CosmoMC. If I add a new parameter, let's call it paramname:
1) if I want to give it a Gaussian prior via do I still need to specify a range (i.e. a flat prior) anyway (e.g. in the same .ini file?) 2) as a corollary of the above (assuming it is correct), does always overwrite , although the latter is always necessary?

Thanks! Cheers,
Sunny

1. Yes
2. No, the two are independent things. param[paramnames] sets hard bounds for the range of the parameters, prior[paramname] sets a Gaussian-shaped prior within that bound

Thanks Antony,

as for 2), what I meant is, while specifying param[paramname] is necessary, if I on top of it specify prior[paramname], CosmoMC will be sampling that parameter from the Gaussian distributionspecified by prior[paramname], using param[paramname] only to restrict the range of values from which it draws samples (hard limits), but not sampling this parameter according to the associated uniform distribution? Is this correct?

Cheers,
Sunny