What is Mersenne Twister?
PHP has a function called rand. There is also a function called mt_rand.
I was studying about these functions and realized that in previous versions it was necessary to use such a "random number Sower".
One of them is the function called mt_srand.
In this excerpt of the PHP Manual I saw that there is a reference to the name Mersenne Twister. I realized then that this mt_ at the beginning of the function had something related.
I got to see on Wikipedia something, but I found it a little vague.
So I would like to kill this curiosity:
- What is Mersenne Twister? Does it have anything to do with this Sower or the randomization process?
1 answers
I translate Wikipedia article about :
The Mersenne-Twister is a pseudo random number generator (PRNG). It is by far the most widely used general purpose pseudogenerator. Its name derives from the fact that its range is a number Prime of Mersenne.
Was developed in 1997 by Makoto Matsumoto (Mak本??) and Takuji Nishimura (西村 拓士?). It was developed specifically to rectify old problems encountered older pseudo-generators. It was the first pseudo-generator to provide fast generation of pseudorandom integers with quality.
The most common version of the algorithm used is based on Marsenne's cousin 219937-1. Its default implementation, MT19937, uses a 32-bit whole word. There is another implementation that uses a 64-bit word, MT19937-64, and that generates a very different sequence.