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Further Properties of a Good Random Number Generator

Portability -- should give the same results on different computers.

Efficiency -- should be fast (small number of floating point operations) and not use much memory.

Disjoint subsequences -- different seeds should produce long independent (disjoint) subsequences so that there are no correlations between simulations with different initial seeds.

Homogeneity -- sequences of all bits should be random.



Paul Coddington, Northeast Parallel Architectures Center at Syracuse University, paulc@npac.syr.edu