The DOI matches its Crossref record; 17 of the 17 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Efficient and portable combined random number generators
Open accessAbstract
In this paper we present an efficient way to combine two or more Multiplicative Linear Congruential Generators (MLCGs) and propose several new generators. The individual MLCGs, making up the proposed combined generators, satisfy stringent theoretical criteria for the quality of the sequence they produce (based on the Spectral Test) and are easy to implement in a portable way. The proposed simple combination method is new and produces a generator whose period is the least common multiple of the individual periods. Each proposed generator has been submitted to a comprehensive battery of statistical tests. We also describe portable implementations, using 16-bit or 32-bit integer arithmetic. The proposed generators have most of the beneficial properties of MLCGs. For example, each generator can be split into many independent generators and it is easy to skip a long subsequence of numbers without doing the work of generating them all.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
The Art of Computer Programming
Knuth, D. E. (1968) · Cited by 16,000
The Art of Computer Programming. Volume 2: Seminumerical Algorithms.
Taussky, O., & Knuth, D. E. (1970) · The American Mathematical Monthly · doi:10.2307/2317055 · Cited by 3,822
Bratley, P., Fox, B. L., & Schrage, L. E. (1987) · Springer eBooks · doi:10.1007/978-1-4419-8724-2 · Cited by 1,468
The art of computer programming. Vol.2: Seminumerical algorithms
Knuth, D. E. (1981) · Virtual Defense Library (Ministerio de Defensa) · Cited by 1,232
Quasi-Monte Carlo methods and pseudo-random numbers
Niederreiter, H. (1978) · Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society · doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1978-14532-7 · Cited by 806
Algorithm AS 183: An Efficient and Portable Pseudo-Random Number Generator
Wichmann, B. A., & Hill, I. D. (1982) · Applied Statistics · doi:10.2307/2347988 · Cited by 618
Information Processing Models of Cognition
Simon, H. A. (1979) · Annual Review of Psychology · doi:10.1146/annurev.ps.30.020179.002051 · Cited by 543
RANDOM NUMBERS FALL MAINLY IN THE PLANES
Marsaglia, G. (1968) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.61.1.25 · Cited by 521
A guide to simulation (2nd ed.)
Bratley, P., Fox, B. L., & Schrage, L. E. (1986) · Springer eBooks · Cited by 500
A pseudo-random number generator for the System/360
Lewis, P. A. W., Goodman, A. S., & Miller, J. M. (1969) · IBM Systems Journal · doi:10.1147/sj.82.0136 · Cited by 370
Cited by
Stan : A Probabilistic Programming Language
Carpenter, B., Gelman, A., Hoffman, M. D., Lee, D., Goodrich, B., Betancourt, M., Brubaker, M., Guo, J., Li, P., & Riddell, A. (2017) · Journal of Statistical Software · doi:10.18637/jss.v076.i01 · Cited by 7,754
TestU01: A C library for empirical testing of random number generators
L'Ecuyer, P., & Simard, R. (2007) · ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software · doi:10.1145/1268776.1268777 · Cited by 1,014
Self-citationTurbsim User's Guide: Version 1.50
Jonkman, B. J. (2009) · doi:10.2172/965520 · Cited by 746
Distributions of error correction tests for cointegration
Ericsson, N. R., & MacKinnon, J. G. (2002) · The Econometrics Journal · doi:10.1111/1368-423x.00085 · Cited by 320
Schmitz, C., & Hof, P. R. (2000) · Journal of Chemical Neuroanatomy · doi:10.1016/s0891-0618(00)00066-1 · Cited by 272
Metadata
- Authors
- L'Ecuyer, P.
- Venue
- Communications of the ACM
- Published
- 1988-06
- Volume
- 31
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 742-751
- ISSN
- 0001-0782 (ISSN-L)
- 1557-7317
- OpenAlex
- W2082752515
- Cited by
- 494
- References
- 17
- FWCI
- 20.64
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Efficient and portable combined random number generators. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/62959.62969
- The paper
- L'Ecuyer, P. (1988). Efficient and portable combined random number generators. Communications of the ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/62959.62969
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
