On 10 Jul 1998, d. hall wrote: >A random number generator shouldn't be easy to read nor understand. International Obfuscated C Contest Entrant? >It so be esoteric, voodoo source, for the simple reason that unless you've >got a serious math background, and wish to play intensively with >Stochastic methods, and have no idea what monto carlo is, you've got no >business playing with a random number's algorithm. for (kk=0;kk<N-M;kk++) { y = (mt[kk]&UPPER_MASK)|(mt[kk+1]&LOWER_MASK); mt[kk] = mt[kk+M] ^ (y >> 1) ^ mag01[y & 0x1]; } I'm quite happy with the simple allocater we currently have instead of that jumbled mess, no matter how much faster it is supposed to be. >The reason for the original random inclusion was to offset a bad random >function often found within native libraries. Yes, and the problem has been solved with circle_random. >You should be less worried about a random number's pure speed within 1 >million iterations over the fact that it truly as pseudo-random as >possible. A purist in algorithms can respect that. If you're that purist, just read from /dev/random and forget your own allocator. That's cryptologically secure and fast in randomness, at least in Linux. There's a huge comment in linux/drivers/char/random.c that is good reading. -- George Greer, greerga@circlemud.org | Genius may have its limitations, but http://patches.van.ml.org/ | stupidity is not thus handicapped. http://www.van.ml.org/CircleMUD/ | -- Elbert Hubbard +------------------------------------------------------------+ | Ensure that you have read the CircleMUD Mailing List FAQ: | | http://democracy.queensu.ca/~fletcher/Circle/list-faq.html | +------------------------------------------------------------+
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