A blog which discusses various GPU applications including visualization, GPGPU and games.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

C++0x random header

C++0x includes a number of new headers, one of which includes new random number facilities. The functionality is ingeniously separated into two major parts: engines and distributions.

Engines are responsible for generating uniformly distributed random numbers. One such provided engine is the Mersenne Twister engine. Distributions use the output of engines to mold the numbers to a specific distribution.

Consider the following example.

mt19937 engine(static_cast<unsigned long>(time(NULL)));
exponential_distribution<double> dist;
cout << dist(engine) << endl;

The output is a single random number, following the exponential distribution. Now let's say we want to use this in a call to generate_n with a lambda:

mt19937 engine(static_cast<unsigned long>(time(NULL)));
exponential_distribution<double> dist;
generate_n(ostream_iterator<double>(cout, "\n"), 20, [&dist,&engine]() -> double { return dist(engine); });

You're probably thinking that a simple for loop would be much cleaner here, and I don't disagree. However, there is one other thing we can do:

mt19937 engine(static_cast<unsigned long>(time(NULL)));
exponential_distribution<double> dist;
variate_generator<mt19937, exponential_distribution<double>> gen(engine, dist);
generate_n(ostream_iterator<double>(cout, "\n"), 20, gen);

That's right -- variate_generator is provided to us so that we can encapsulate an engine along with a distribution. That way, a simple gen() gets us a random number using the desired engine and distribution.

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