A brief history of random numbers (2018)

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• Hacker News
• Talk about skipping a `1.0` release. Is anyone else scratching their heads about this? Here https://hg.sr.ht/~icefox/oorandom/rev/46ca789e6bb68cfc5d838f... the project jumps from a 0.1.0 release to 9.3.0.
  by dollylambda
• From the title, I expected to see a list of recently-generated random numbers.

  I got a 27 yesterday.

  by glonq
• I love how this is written. A lot of things nowadays on this site, if only vaguely, make me think it was written in part by an LLM, but this didn’t fall into that category. Great read, bravo!
  by olivia-banks
• This was entertaining and informative, the best kind of info. But one puzzle remains - why did the author keep mentioning slide rules as a tool that would reveal the non-randomness of some number series ?

  I don’t get that part.

  by PantaloonFlames
• Is there a good text on random number generation that someone on HN can recommend? I've read about various generators, pseudorandom and truly random, but those have always been scattered across various places, and I'm wondering if there's a good solid unified text on all of them, in terms of families of them and their underlying ideas, and their advantages and disadvantages.
  by derbOac
• I thought this was a proper article. It was a good read. Then I start looking around at the page and was like 'where the hell am I? This is a rust crate readme?!'
  by jkhall81
• > Since nobody had figured out any downsides to PCG's yet, everyone shrugged and said "might as well just go with that then", and that is where, as of 2019, the art currently stands. The problem is solved, and life is good.

  I wonder who "everyone" was, I'm not aware of many high-profile projects adopting PCG as a default. As of 2025, several high-profile runtimes (including all the major browsers) use xorshift variants [1]

  Is there a list of users of PCG?

  [1] See Adoption section in https://prng.di.unimi.it/

  by ot
• A history about random number generation isn't complete without mentioning George Marsaglias work.

  He is responsible for multiply-with-carry, xorshift (the original version), KISS (a high quality generator predating the mersene twister) , the Ziggurat algorithm, diehard

  Fun fact, one of the earliest methods for generating random mumbers, the middle square method, actually still passes all moderm statistical randomness test suites, if you hook up a weyl sequence to it: https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.00358

  This, the middle square weyl sequence PRNG is my favoeite PRNG, because it's simple enough to implement from memory:

      uint64_t x, weyl;
      uint32_t msws(void) {
          x = x * x + (weyl += CONSTANT);
          return x = (x >> 32) | (x << 32);
      }
  

  You just take a number, square it, advace and add the weyl sequence to it amd finally swap the lower and upper bits, using the trucated result as the output.

  The CONSTANT is pretty much arbitrary, it just needs to be odd and not too regular. A good rule of thumb is to have no repeating or zero nibbles in each group of 4 bytes, e.g. 0xB5AD4ECEDA1CE2A9.

  by camel-cdr