Message367247
SystemRandom is a weird special case. Otherwise, almost every PRNG is going to need seed(), getstate(), and setstate(). A base class should each offer some reusable code to minimize the burden on the subclass:
* The existing seed method allows multiple input types to be collapsed to a long integer. A subclass can extend this as needed or can override it completely. This is useful and will tend to give a more consistent API across multiple RNGs.
* The getstate/setstate methods take care of the gauss_next value and allow the seeding to be versioned. This is also useful and helps us insulate users from state related implementation details such as gauss_next.
Please don't lose the above functionality by default.
Also, please make sure that code written to the existing spec continues to work.¹
+1 on offering a PCG generator; however, it should an additional alternative to MT and SystemRandom rather than a replacement. Also, it needs to work well on 32-bit builds. Notes should be added that its state space is *much* smaller than MT, so shuffle() becomes state space limited at much smaller population sizes -- meaning that a large number of possible permutations become unreachable by shuffle() -- for example, to cover all possible shuffles for a deck of 52 playing cards requires 226 bits.² Also, I expect that PCG won't offer us the same performance advantage as it does for numpy because the MT code itself is only a fraction of the time in a call to random(); the rest of the time is in the function call overhead, converting the bytes to a C double, and creating a new Python float object.
I would still like to see a PEP for this.
¹ https://code.activestate.com/recipes/576707/
² factorial(52).bit_length() |
|
Date |
User |
Action |
Args |
2020-04-25 00:55:03 | rhettinger | set | recipients:
+ rhettinger, tim.peters, mark.dickinson, pitrou, vstinner, serhiy.storchaka |
2020-04-25 00:55:03 | rhettinger | set | messageid: <1587776103.09.0.506979948556.issue40346@roundup.psfhosted.org> |
2020-04-25 00:55:03 | rhettinger | link | issue40346 messages |
2020-04-25 00:55:02 | rhettinger | create | |
|