On 7 December 2011 14:54, Jonas Maebe <jonas.maebe@....> wrote: > > That's correct. We use the mersenne twister, Delphi probably a linear > congruential generator. The mersenne twister has a much larger period.
I was reading a bit more about this. The Mersenne Twister (MT) generator has a massive period of 2^19937−1, compared to the XorShift generator, which in turn has a period of 2^128-1. Most text I read mentions that MT is great for statistical purposes, and performs well in its class. So wouldn't it maybe make more sense to let the standard (read more common) Random() call use a higher performance random number generator, with a much lower period. Then add the MT generator as a call to the Maths unit - where more statistical functions are located? Most applications are not statistical apps, they just want a random number here or there, so such high period low performance generator is normally not required. Having it in the Maths unit still makes in available when needed though - for those specialised apps. Just a thought... -- Regards, - Graeme - _______________________________________________ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://fpgui.sourceforge.net _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
