Nearly a year ago, I wrote a post suggesting some good alternatives to PCG. As part of that post, I included links to C++ implementations of those PRNGs, following C++-11 conventions (although omitting rarely-used features such as state I/O). Since that post, I've written my own C++ implementations of a few more generation schemes. Links and brief descriptions below. Read more… (3 min remaining to read)| PCG, A Better Random Number Generator
My two favorite statistical test suites for PRNGs are PractRand and TestU01, but while they detect statistical flaws of many kinds, detecting those flaws often takes a long time to run, and for various reasons some flaws take a very long time to detect (if they are detected at all). In this post, we'll put together a test based around a very classic example from the world of probability theory, the Birthday Problem. In doing so, we'll develop a test that can detect deviations from random beha...| PCG, A Better Random Number Generator
On 14 May 2018, Sebastiano Vigna added a page to his website (archived here) entitled “The wrap-up on PCG generators” that attempts to persuade readers to avoid various PCG generators. That day, he also submitted a link to his critique to Reddit (archived here). I think it is fair to say that his remarks did not get quite the reception he might have hoped for. Readers mostly seemed to infer a certain animosity in his tone and his criticisms gained little traction with that audience. Altho...| PCG, A Better Random Number Generator
The vast majority of my posts about random number generation have focused on looking at the properties of different generation schemes. But, perhaps surprisingly, the performance of your randomized a| PCG, A Better Random Number Generator