The Mersenne Twister

David Landgren writes "The Mersenne Twister is a peudorandom number generator (PRNG) that was developed in Japan a couple of years ago. It is fast (no division or multiplication), takes advantage of pipelining, has a proven period of ¹⁹⁹³⁷-1 and has a very small memory footprint. The GPL'ed source code is available for download at the site. Professor Knuth, commenting on the original name Primitive Twisted Generalized Feedback Shift Register said "the name is a mouthful". So they came up with the name Mersenne Twister, to which Prof. Knuth replied "it sounds [like] a nice name." Now there is no longer any need to continue with the random number generator supplied with the compiler. I'm off to see about patching perl to use this..."