Dear all, I am happy to announce the release of tf-random 0.1. tf-random is a high-quality splittable pseudorandom number generator intended to address the random number quality problems of the standard Haskell StdGen generator.
tf-random uses a cryptographic hash function under the hood to generate pseudorandom numbers, which is based on the ThreeFish block cipher. The design of the generator is explained in the paper 'Splittable Pseudorandom Number Generators Using Cryptographic Hashing' by Claessen, Pałka, which will be presented on the upcoming Haskell Symposium. The performance of tf-random was found to be about 8% slower than StdGen on typical QuickCheck properties, which make heavy use of splitting, but up to 2x faster in linear generation on a x86-64 processor. The package is available from hackage at: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/tf-random The code has not yet been thoroughly tested, so expect bugs. For example, it has never been tried on a big-endian architecture, and I would appreciate if somebody could check if the results returned by it are the same (with a given random seed) as on x86. In addition to the generator, the package also contains alternative versions of the RandomGen and Random classes. The most notable difference is that method 'next' from RandomGen returns a Word32 drawn uniformly from its the full range. The reason for this change is that I found it impossible to write efficient Random instances that are parametrized over the range of the generator (genRange). The instances currently defined in the random package make an (illegitimate) assumption that the range of StdGen is used, for that matter. I hope that this release will spark a discussion about the future of the standard PRNG and the RandomGen API in Haskell. Best regards, Michał PS. Please copy me when replying as I am not on the list. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
