[Caml-list] Ocaml PRNG Passes Diehard Tests
Will Farr
I was curious yesterday to see how good the OCaml PRNG algorithm was.
After a bit of googling, I couldn't find any tests of it with the
"gold standard" of PRNG tests, Diehard (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diehard_tests
; from that site, there is a link to obtain C and FORTRAN programs
which test a binary file of random bits). So, I ran the Diehard test
suite myself, using about 30MB of random bits generated from the
stdlib Random module. Good news: it passed.
Attached is the output of the test; basically, "passing" means that
none of the P-values was too close to 0.000000 or 1.000000. See the
Diehard NOTES file for more information, and also the note at the top
of the output regarding the significance of large or small p-values.
I just wanted to send this message so that future googlers like me
yesterday will know that this test has been run, and that the OCaml
PRNG passed.
Will