What is Mersenne Twister?

Question

PHP has a function called rand. There is also a function called mt_rand.

I was studying about these functions and realized that, in previous versions, it was necessary to use such a "random number seeder".

One of them is the function called mt_srand.

In this excerpt from Manual for PHP I saw that there is a reference to the name Mersenne Twister. Then I realized that mt_ at the beginning of the function had something to do with.

I saw something on Wikipedia, but I found it a little vague.

Then I’d like to kill that curiosity:

• What is Mersenne Twister? Has something to do with this sower or the randomization process?

Answer 1

I translate Wikipedia article about:

Mersenne-Twister is a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG). It is by far the most widely used pseudo-generator. Its name derives from the fact that its interval is a number Primo de Mersenne.

It was developed in 1997 by Makoto Matsumoto (松 本 眞) and Takuji Nishimura (西 村 拓 士). It was developed specifically to rectify old problems encountered older pseudogenerators. It was the first pseudogenerator to provide fast generation of pseudorandom integers with quality.

The most common version of the algorithm used is based on Marsenne’s Primo 219937 1. His standard implementation, MT19937, uses a 32-bit integer word. There is another implementation that uses a 64-bit word, MT19937-64, and generates a very different sequence.