Mersenne Twister
One of The Most Common Pseudorandom Generators
The Mersenne Twister is a pseudorandom number generator. It is by far the most widely used general-purpose PRNG. Its name derives from the fact that its period length is chosen to be a Mersenne prime. The Mersenne Twister was developed in 1997 by Makoto Matsumoto and Takuji Nishimura. The most commonly used version of the Mersenne Twister algorithm is based on the Mersenne prime 219937−1. The standard implementation of that, MT19937, uses a 32-bit word length. There is another implementation (with five variants) that uses a 64-bit word length, MT19937-64; it generates a different sequence.
Schematics of The Algorithm
This algorithm is named after Marin Mersenne, who was a French polymath
whose works touched a wide variety of fields. He is perhaps best known
today among mathematicians for Mersenne prime numbers, those which can
be written in the form Mₙ = 2ⁿ − 1 for some integer n.
Marin Mersenne
📚 More Resources:
Mersenne Twister
PRNGs
Marin Mersenne's biography
Mersenne Primes
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