From: "Mauricio Fernández" <batsman.geo@...>
Date: 2003-02-13T18:12:35+09:00
Subject: Re: random number generator - was .sig - was Re: Windows support

On Thu, Feb 13, 2003 at 11:53:06AM +0900, Eric Hodel wrote:
> Hal E. Fulton (hal9000@hypermetrics.com) wrote:
> 
> > Well, I don't think it's platform-specific, as I'm
> > also on Windows:
> > 
> >   ruby 1.7.3 (2002-11-17) [i386-mswin32]
> > 
> > Maybe version-specific? That's a tiny bit disturbing
> > if so...

Yes, as it has changed...
 
> rand() is probably implemented in terms of rand(3).  On FreeBSD, 4 and 5

It is not. As of 1.7.3, it is using the Mersenne Twister.

Fri Jul 26 14:31:06 2002  Yukihiro Matsumoto  <matz@ruby-lang.org>

        * random.c: replace with Mersenne Twister RNG.

The 1.6 branch uses the system's rand() or random(), so results would
depend on the platform. The change must have occurred between 1.7.2 and
1.7.3 since I'm getting the same results with 1.7.2 and 1.6.8.

> will have different versions of rand(), so this didn't work at all for
> me.

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