PCG, A Better Random Number Generator

Reddit has decided that I am a robot, and robots can't play on Reddit, so my account has been banned.

The vast majority of my posts about random number generation have focused on looking at the properties of different generation schemes.

Nearly a year ago, I wrote a post suggesting some good alternatives to PCG.

In a recent post, I noted that the Vigna and Blackman's new Xoshiro family of PRNGs is prone to some implausible repeats.

My two favorite statistical test suites for PRNGs are PractRand and TestU01, but while they detect statistical flaws of many kinds, detecting those flaws often takes a long time to run, and for various reasons some flaws take a very long time to detect (if

In my previous post, I looked at Bob Jenkins's JSF PRNG which has, at its heart, a random invertible mapping rather than a random (noninvertible) mapping.

I've been chatting on and off with David Blackman since August, 2017.

On 14 May 2018, Sebastiano Vigna added a page to his website (archived here) entitled “The wrap-up on PCG generators” that attempts to persuade readers to avoid various PCG generators.

It's now been a week since David Blackman and Sebastiano Vigna announced new members of the Xoroshiro family.

On May 4, David Blackman and Sebastiano Vigna announced new members of the Xoroshiro family and a new test for random number generators (based on the z9 test from gjrand) that their previous work fails, all described in a new paper.