#define HAVE_UNISTD_H 1 #define GETTIMEOFDAY_TWO_ARGS 1 /* yarandom.c -- Yet Another Random Number Generator. The unportable mess that is rand(), random(), drand48() and friends led me to ask Phil Karlton what the Right Thing to Do was. He responded with this. It is non-cryptographically secure, reasonably random (more so than anything that is in any C library), and very fast. I don't understand how it works at all, but he says "look at Knuth, Vol. 2 (original edition), page 26, Algorithm A. In this case n=55, k=20 and m=2^32." So there you have it. --------------------------- Note: xlockmore 4.03a10 uses this very simple RNG: if ((seed = seed % 44488 * 48271 - seed / 44488 * 3399) < 0) seed += 2147483647; return seed-1; of which it says ``Dr. Park's algorithm published in the Oct. '88 ACM "Random Number Generators: Good Ones Are Hard To Find" His version available at ftp://cs.wm.edu/pub/rngs.tar Present form by many authors.'' Karlton says: ``the usual problem with that kind of RNG turns out to be unexepected short cycles for some word lengths.'' Karlton's RNG is faster, since it does three adds and two stores, while the xlockmore RNG does two multiplies, two divides, three adds, and one store. Compiler optimizations make a big difference here: gcc -O: difference is 1.2x. gcc -O2: difference is 1.4x. gcc -O3: difference is 1.5x. SGI cc -O: difference is 2.4x. SGI cc -O2: difference is 2.4x. SGI cc -O3: difference is 5.1x. Irix 6.2; Indy r5k; SGI cc version 6; gcc version 2.7.2.1. */ #ifdef HAVE_UNISTD_H # include /* for getpid() */ #endif #include /* for gettimeofday() */ #include "yarandom.h" /* The following 'random' numbers are taken from CRC, 18th Edition, page 622. Each array element was taken from the corresponding line in the table, except that a[0] was from line 100. 8s and 9s in the table were simply skipped. The high order digit was taken mod 4. */ #define VectorSize 55 static unsigned int a[VectorSize] = { 035340171546, 010401501101, 022364657325, 024130436022, 002167303062, /* 5 */ 037570375137, 037210607110, 016272055420, 023011770546, 017143426366, /* 10 */ 014753657433, 021657231332, 023553406142, 004236526362, 010365611275, /* 14 */ 007117336710, 011051276551, 002362132524, 001011540233, 012162531646, /* 20 */ 007056762337, 006631245521, 014164542224, 032633236305, 023342700176, /* 25 */ 002433062234, 015257225043, 026762051606, 000742573230, 005366042132, /* 30 */ 012126416411, 000520471171, 000725646277, 020116577576, 025765742604, /* 35 */ 007633473735, 015674255275, 017555634041, 006503154145, 021576344247, /* 40 */ 014577627653, 002707523333, 034146376720, 030060227734, 013765414060, /* 45 */ 036072251540, 007255221037, 024364674123, 006200353166, 010126373326, /* 50 */ 015664104320, 016401041535, 016215305520, 033115351014, 017411670323 /* 55 */ }; static int i1, i2; unsigned int ya_random (void) { register int ret = a[i1] + a[i2]; a[i1] = ret; if (++i1 >= VectorSize) i1 = 0; if (++i2 >= VectorSize) i2 = 0; return ret; } void ya_rand_init(unsigned int seed) { int i; if (seed == 0) { struct timeval tp; #ifdef GETTIMEOFDAY_TWO_ARGS struct timezone tzp; gettimeofday(&tp, &tzp); #else gettimeofday(&tp); #endif /* ignore overflow */ seed = (999*tp.tv_sec) + (1001*tp.tv_usec) + (1003 * getpid()); } a[0] += seed; for (i = 1; i < VectorSize; i++) { seed = a[i-1]*1001 + seed*999; a[i] += seed; } i1 = a[0] % VectorSize; i2 = (i1 + 024) % VectorSize; }