C++ : mt19937 Example

C++11 introduces several pseudo-random number generators designed to replace the good-old rand from the C standard library. I’ll show basic usage examples of std::mt19937, which provides a random number generation based on Mersenne Twister algorithm. Using the Mersenne Twister implementation that comes with C++1 has advantage over rand(), among them:

  1. mt19937 has much longer period than that of rand, e.g. it will take its random sequence much longer to repeat itself.
  2. It much better statistical behavior.
  3. Several different random number generator engines can be initiated simultaneously with different seed, compared with the single “global” seed srand() provides.

The downside is that mt19937 is a bit less straight-forward to use. However, I hope this post will help with this point :-).
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