On 19 Des, 14:06, Carl Johan Rehn <car...@gmail.com> wrote: > Matlab and numpy have (by chance?) the exact names for the same > functionality,
Common ancenstry, NumPy and Matlab borrowed the name from IDL. LabView, Octave and SciLab uses the name randn as well. > So the basioc question is, how can I speed up random number > generation? The obvious thing would be to compile ziggurat yourself, and turn on optimization flags for your hardware. http://www.jstatsoft.org/v05/i08/ P.S. Be careful if you consider using more than one processor. Multithreading is a very difficult issue with PRNGs, becuase it is difficult to guarrantee they are truely independent. But you can use a producer-consumer pattern, though: one thread constantly producing random numbers (writing into a buffer or pipe) and another thread(s) consuming them. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list