[bug-gawk] Bug in random() in builtin.c

[Bob Jewett]

Dear address@hidden,

The present rand() function in gawk has a bug in the correlation
of consecutive values.  This causes some uses of rand() to
produce non-white noise.  There may be other problems as well. 
You can repeat the problem by:

    gawk 'BEGIN{for(i=0;i<2^14;i++)print ((rand()-0.5)*(rand()-0.5))^2;}' |
        fft |
        low-pass-filter |
        plot

The particular place we saw the problem was with Knuth's
suggested method of generating gaussian-distributed random values
because it uses two consecutive random values and combines them
in a way similar to the above. 

It would probably be better to fix random(), which also has a pair-wise
correlation problem, but that's beyond my level of expertise.

Best regards,
Bob Jewett
address@hidden
+1-408-553-7449

builtin_diffs.txt
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