in reply to Upper limit to Mersenne Twister Algorithm?

You talk about "better". Better in which sense? Without stating what you want of a random number generator†, it's impossible to order algorithms on a scale of "good, better, best".

†Things you may want: speed, repeatability, hard to predict, etc.

  • Comment on Re: Upper limit to Mersenne Twister Algorithm?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Upper limit to Mersenne Twister Algorithm?
by tritan (Sexton) on Aug 30, 2010 at 16:26 UTC

    Updated! Does my question make more sense now?

[reply]
      Not at all. In fact, it even makes less sense. What do you mean by "breaks down in its ability to be random"? Note that for every PRNG, given the algorithm, seed and sequence number, the rest of the sequence is 100% predictable.
[reply]

        Well, I'm referring to where, after enough iterations, the function begins to repeat itself. My understanding is that the regular rand() function, on certain systems, has a ceiling on the number of random numbers it produces. Such that if you run enough simulations, you will begin getting the same numbers as before. Therefore, I guess my main question was whether this ceiling was relatively high for the TM algorithm.

[reply]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom