Mersenne twister
- Date
- 1997 · confidence high
- Place
- Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan
- Credited to
- Makoto Matsumoto and Takuji Nishimura
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What it is
General-purpose pseudorandom number generator with an extremely long period (2^19937-1) that fixes the flaws of earlier generators; the most widely used in simulations, non-cryptographic applications, and programming languages.
What it led to
- standard random generators in programming languages
- high-quality Monte Carlo simulations
- video games and statistical modeling
- machine learning algorithms using random sampling