/* yarandom.c -- Yet Another Random Number Generator.
* Copyright (c) 1997-2014 by Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>
* Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute, and sell this software and its
* documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided that
* the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that
* copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting
* documentation. No representations are made about the suitability of this
* software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or
/* The unportable mess that is rand(), random(), drand48() and friends led me
to ask Phil Karlton <karlton@netscape.com> 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,
---------------------------
Note: xlockmore 4.03a10 uses this very simple RNG:
if ((seed = seed % 44488 * 48271 - seed / 44488 * 3399) < 0)
``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.
# include <unistd.h> /* for getpid() */
#include <sys/time.h> /* for gettimeofday() */
/* 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.
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 */
register int ret
= a
[i1
] + a
[i2
];
if (++i1
>= VectorSize
) i1
= 0;
if (++i2
>= VectorSize
) i2
= 0;
ya_rand_init(unsigned int seed
)
#ifdef GETTIMEOFDAY_TWO_ARGS
/* Since the multiplications will have a larger effect on the
upper bits than the lower bits, after every addition in the
seed, perform a bitwise rotate by an odd number, resulting
in a better distribution of randomness throughout the bits.
#define ROT(X,N) (((X)<<(N)) | ((X)>>((sizeof(unsigned int)*8)-(N))))
seed
= (999U * (unsigned int) tp
.tv_sec
);
seed
+= (1001 * (unsigned int) tp
.tv_usec
);
seed
+= (1003 * (unsigned int) getpid());
for (i
= 1; i
< VectorSize
; i
++)
i2
= (i1
+ 24) % VectorSize
;