I personally have not heard of this approach to "extending" random number generators. However, it is possible that this extension is not used because it is unclear whether or not many of the "randomness" properties hold using this extension.

For example, is the resulting sequence "well-distributed"? In the case of the transformed $M=8 sequence, it is. Are consecutive pairs of the resulting sequence well-distributed? In the case of the same sequence, no they are not (for example, two identical consecutive digits is 20% less likely than it should be). In this particular case, this is perhaps expected, because the original sequence didn't have this property. But in general, if we take a sequence that has some "good randomness property", will the transformed sequence have the property too? In short, period length isn't always the only thing to consider.


In reply to Re: the -other- shuffling question by kaif
in thread the -other- shuffling question by mstone

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.