Tag: mt19937

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 random number generation based on the Mersenne Twister algorithm. Using the Mersenne Twister implementation that comes with C++11 has advantages over rand(), including:

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

The downside is that mt19937 is a bit less straightforward to use. However, I hope this post will help with that point :-).
Continue reading C++: mt19937 Example