Re: the -other- shuffling question

What you want is the Mersenne Twister. I've had an interest in RNGs for years, and this is the best I've seen (and probably will be the best for some time to come). There are two CPAN modules that implement it: Math::Random::MT (which appears to be the lastest implementation), and Rand::MersenneTwister.

With Math::Random::MT, the best starting seed would consist of 624 long ints. You can use Net::Random to get the random starting seed from Random.org using the URL:
http://www.random.org/cgi-bin/randbyte?nbytes=2496&format=h

There's always one more bug.

Comment on Re: the -other- shuffling question

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Re^2: the -other- shuffling question by mstone (Deacon) on Jun 13, 2005 at 20:43 UTC
I'm familiar with the MT.. I have Matsumoto & Nishmura's paper on it right here, in fact. Yes, it has a huge period (on the order of 2^19937), its spectral distribution is good up to 263 dimensions, and the analysis looks great. But its mechanism is totally different from the one I'm talking about here. I'm not looking for a long-period RNG per se. If I want one of those, yeah, I'll probably use the Twister. The itch I'm trying to scratch here is theoretical. This particular machine strikes me as interesting, and I want to learn what makes it tick.	[reply]

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Re^2: the -other- shuffling question
by mstone (Deacon) on Jun 13, 2005 at 20:43 UTC

I'm familiar with the MT.. I have Matsumoto & Nishmura's paper on it right here, in fact. Yes, it has a huge period (on the order of 2^19937), its spectral distribution is good up to 263 dimensions, and the analysis looks great. But its mechanism is totally different from the one I'm talking about here.

I'm not looking for a long-period RNG per se. If I want one of those, yeah, I'll probably use the Twister. The itch I'm trying to scratch here is theoretical. This particular machine strikes me as interesting, and I want to learn what makes it tick.

[reply]