Information on calculator Random Number Generators from PPC Journal articles

[Namir]

Pauli,

I believe that all (most?) of the PRNG discussed in this thread are, shall we say, light weight PRNG that should work well/satisfactorily with calculator programs, simulations, and games. I don't expect ANY of them to pass the TESTU01 benchmark. Two years ago I tinkered with PRNGs using first Excel and then Matlab (was faster). I was able to (accidentally) find a method that generated calculation noise (in the fractional part of the results) with good random numbers. I checked the method with Excel VBA and realized that the random calculation noise (generated when you take the fractional part of large numbers) was particular to Matlab! I did use several tests (not the full sweet) for randomness and calculated an overall factor that gauged the general performance. You can see the results on my web site. The lesson I learned from this experience is to use integers as the core of PRNG algorithms and calculated the uniform random number only as the last step. Using mainly-floating-point methods puts you at the mercy of the programming language (and version) and its floating-point precision.

Namir