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crandommersenne-twister

How to properly seed a mersenne twister RNG?

This is actually not as simple as I first thought.

In the absence of a hardware RNG, what is the best way to seed a Mersenne Twister?

Or should I say, what is an acceptable way to seed a a Mersenne Twister RNG that is used to generate UUID's?

Solution

  • There is a nice discussion of pseudo-random number generators here including a section on the proper seeding of PRNGs (see rule 3), which uses md5sum and /dev/random or /dev/urandom to generate seeds.

    This also includes a number of PRNG alogrithms which are a lot easier to code up (< 10 lines of code) than the MT but are arguably just as good (long periods and pass all of the Dieharder tests for randomness).

    Further Reading:

    1. Seed std::mt19937 from std::random_device
    2. Best way to seed mt19937_64 for Monte Carlo simulations
    3. How to obtain (almost) unique system identifier in a cross platform way?