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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!akgua!mcnc!decvax!harpo!ulysses!allegra!don
From: don@allegra.UUCP (D. Mitchell)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Subject: randomness
Message-ID: <2431@allegra.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 22-Apr-84 01:20:24 EST
Article-I.D.: allegra.2431
Posted: Sun Apr 22 01:20:24 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 23-Apr-84 01:25:10 EST
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill
Lines: 14

My statement was not misleading.  "random()" as distributed, is very
poor.  While Mr. Cohen says he ran extensive checks, I found it badly
failed simple correlation tests.  I use my own generator (which I
posted) so I just forgot about it.  A few days later, Jim Reeds ran
some tests and actually predicted the bug on the basis of those test,
which we then found.  (That is, the use of a polynomial that was not
irreducible)

I would say with the bug fixed, random() is just fine.

If you want floating point numbers, I would recommend my frandom().  It
generates a full 56-bit random mantissa, and is therefore much better
(and much faster) than dividing an integer random number by
(double)2**31.