George Marsaglia has written an excellent random number generator that is extremely fast, simple, and has a much higher period than the Mersenne Twister. Here is the code with a description:
good C random number generator
I wanted to port the CMWC4096 code to Java, but it uses several unsigned datatypes so I am not sure how to do this properly. Here is the full C code:
/* choose random initial c<809430660 and */
/* 4096 random 32-bit integers for Q[] */
static unsigned long Q[4096],c=362436;
unsigned long CMWC4096(void) {
unsigned long long t, a=18782LL;
static unsigned long i=4095;
unsigned long x,r=0xfffffffe;
i = (i+1) & 4095;
t = a*Q[i] + c;
c = (t>>32);
x = t + c;
if (x < c) {
x++;
c++;
}
return (Q[i] = r - x);
}
Can anyone port this to Java? How does this work when you only have signed numbers available?
EDIT: Thanks everybody for the quick answers! For the first 100 million numbers this java code seems to produce the same result as the C code. It is 3 times faster than Java's java.util.Random.
public class ComplimentaryMultiplyWithCarryRandom {
/**
* Choose 4096 random 32-bit integers
*/
private long[] Q;
/**
* choose random initial c<809430660
*/
private long c = 362436;
private int i;
public ComplimentaryMultiplyWithCarryRandom() {
Random r = new Random(1);
Q = new long[4096];
// TODO initialize with real random 32bit values
for (int i = 0; i < 4096; ++i) {
long v = r.nextInt();
v -= Integer.MIN_VALUE;
Q[i] = v;
}
i = 4095;
}
int next() {
i = (i + 1) & 4095;
long t = 18782 * Q[i] + c;
c = t >>> 32;
long x = (t + c) & 0xffffffffL;
if (x < c) {
++x;
++c;
}
long v = 0xfffffffeL - x;
Q[i] = v;
return (int) v;
}
}
Most of the time there is no need to use larger numeric types for simulating unsigned types in Java.
For addition, subtraction, multiplication, shift left, the logical operations, equality and casting to a smaller numeric type it doesn't matter whether the operands are signed or unsigned, the result will be the same regardless, viewed as a bit pattern.
For shifting to the right use >> for signed, >>> for unsigned.
For signed casting to a larger type just do it.
For unsigned casting from a smaller type to a long use & with a mask of type long for the smaller type. E.g., short to long: s & 0xffffL.
For unsigned casting from a smaller type to an int use & with a mask of type int. E.g., byte to int: b & 0xff.
Otherwise do like in the int case and apply a cast on top. E.g., byte to short: (short) (b & 0xff).
For the comparison operators < etc. and division the easiest is to cast to a larger type and do the operation there. But there also exist other options, e.g. do comparisons after adding an appropriate offset.