This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 27 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 27 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
I'm impressed with your SRFI. In the past, there have been some truly awful RNG algorithms published in well-known places, and then used by many people. This is not the case here---the COMBO RNG is quite good. I am bothered, though, by the relative lack of theoretical justification for combination RNGs. As Marsaglia says at the end of his keynote.ps file, "if the numbers are not random, they are at least higgledy piggledy". Basically, I guess I'm too much a mathematician to bring myself to trust "higgledy piggledy" generators that do not have strong theoretical justifications. I've been impressed with what Pierre L'Ecuyer calls "combined multiple recursive random number generators", see his web site at http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~lecuyer See specifically his paper "Good parameters and implementations for combined multiple recursive random number generators". These generators pass the spectral tests of Knuth, volume 2, for large dimensions. They also pass Marsaglia's tests in Diehard (at least, as much as I can interpret them---Marsaglia does not give a whole lot of advice on how he judged whether one should put "Pass" or "Fail" in the boxes of his summary table in keynote.ps). I've posted the paper cited above, together with the results of all diehard tests on combo and a scheme implementation of L'Ecuyer's method at my web site http://www.math.purdue.edu/~lucier/random I believe that L'Ecuyer's generator would make a better choice for a reference implementation. Perhaps I'd just like to see a discussion of the pros and cons of various possible implementations. Brad Lucier