[Bug-gnubg] Simpler PRNG

[Louis Zulli]

Saw this recently in the chess program Stockfish. Worth a look? Better 
randomness than MT:

"This patch replaces RKISS by a simpler and faster PRNG, xorshift64* proposed
by S. Vigna (2014). It is extremely simple, has a large enough period for
Stockfish's needs (2^64), requires no warming-up (allowing such code to be
removed), and offers slightly better randomness than MT19937."

Paper: 
http://xorshift.di.unimi.it/

Reference source code (public domain):

http://xorshift.di.unimi.it/xorshift64star.c



On Jan 14, 2015, at 9:43 AM, Ian Shaw wrote:

> How about simplifying life and offering only Mersenne Twister, manual and, 
> possibly, file dice?
> 
> GnuBg and other bots are now mature programmes, and think we need to go to 
> the same lengths to convince people that the dice are fair. Sure, there will 
> always be some doubters, but such people won't be convinced by anything. No 
> established player has qualms. 
> 
> Multiple dice algorithms just feels like feature bloat to me, to no benefit. 
> For example, rollouts always use MT, and, when posted on the forums I read,  
> there has never been a query raised.
> 
> Getting rid of the other algorithms would simplify the code, the UI and the 
> rollout export data, not to mention the https issues you've been debating.
> 
> -- Ian
> 
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: address@hidden [mailto:bug-
>> address@hidden On Behalf Of Michael
>> Petch
>> Sent: 14 January 2015 10:11
>> To: address@hidden
>> Subject: [Bug-gnubg] The future of Windows builds / Https etc.
>> 
>> Howdy All,
>> 
>> First off Random.org admins have given GNUBG a bit of a reprieve. They are
>> allowing us to use http for the time being to retrieve numbers as we have
>> been doing. Thanks to Thomas Moulton on this mailing list for getting the
>> Random.org admins in contact with me.
>> 
>> For the time being we are okay.
>> 
>> There are issues building a number of libraries on the old tool chain and
>> development environment that I use for Windows production builds. I am
>> using an outdated environment from the latter 2000s. I was using
>> MSYS/MinGW.
>> 
>> I managed to set up an experimental build environment with the forked
>> version of MSYS - MSYS2 along with a MinGW tool chain.
>> 
>> The build of GNUbg wasn't perfect and the source code and configure
>> processing will have to be tweaked for a number of issues. I encountered
>> some issues with Python that have to be overcome as well as errors when
>> compiling with 3D boards. I was able to produce a 2D version that worked
>> reasonably well.
>> 
>> The good news was that I was able to build libcurl with a gnutls backend with
>> minimal fuss. I was able to create test code that could queries random.org
>> with https without any problems. This combination doesn't generate
>> licensing issues.
>> 
>> It will be 2-3 weeks before I can get everything ironed out. I am busy with
>> other things so I can't devote a lot of time to get this environment set up
>> properly and changes to the code made right away.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> --
>> Michael Petch
>> GNU Backgammon Maintainer / Developer
>> OpenPGP FingerPrint=D81C 6A0D 987E 7DA5 3219 6715 466A 2ACE 5CAE 3304
>> 
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