A checklist is forming... 1) speed (that probably means C or Cython) 2) correctness (demonstrate correct randomness according to the distribution AND on differerent platforms) 3) documentation (references, etc)
(any other ideas, feel free to add to this thread ;-) On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 5:08 PM, David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net>wrote: > On 5 September 2010 05:28, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > > scipy.stats has random number generators for about a 100 different > > families of distributions. The last time I tried them, they were of > > variable quality, in that some of them were (very, very) slow. But > > the range of distributions was really impressive. You should look > > at the official book about numpy (yes, numpy), which Travis Oliphant > > wrote. It has a pretty good list of the distributions in numpy.stats > > = scipy.stats. > > > > Whatever you do, I hope you'll benchmark carefully as you go. A > > package that generates random numbers 1000 times slower than MATLAB is > > going to be very annoying to use. Non-cryptography people usually > > generate random numbers because they want a lot of them. > > If they are of variable quality, I would suggest that not only > benchmarking them is important, but testing them for randomness is > too. I know that some implementations that work on one word-size > computer perform really poor if the word size is increased. So an > algorithm only tested on a 32-bit system might perform very badly in a > 64-bit one. > > Most make use of a CPUs register overflowing at some point. If the > word size changes, so the overflow point changes, so the algorithm has > changes. > > Dave > > -- > To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com > To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to > sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com<sage-devel%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com> > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel > URL: http://www.sagemath.org > -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
