DIEHARD

Nothing is random, only uncertain. Gail Gasram

Welcome to the home page of DIEHARD: a battery of tests for random number generators developed by George Marsaglia.

Random Numbers fall mainly in the planes.

Acknowledgments

Research supported by National Science Foundation Grants DMS-8807976 and DMS-9206972 at the Department of Statistics and Supercomputer Computations Research Institute, The Florida State University.

Obtaining Diehard

Source code for DIEHARD is available in C. (It is an f2c conversion of patched and jumbled Fortran code. It seems to work, but you may find it difficult to alter. When building executables, be sure to link with the f2c and math libraries, in that order. In unix, use link options "-lf2c -lm".) Specific exec files are available for DOS, Sun and (i486) Linux. B. Narasimhan's GUI version of Diehard with complete source and documentation will be released shortly.

You can see several snapshots of the GUI version at http://euler.bd.psu.edu/~naras/diehard/snapshots.html .

Instructions for downloading Diehard

Click on the categories you want.

Marsaglia's Random Number CDROM

I have just completed the file structure and will, in January, have a master made to press several hundred copies of a CDROM of random numbers. This CDROM will contain 4.8 billion random bits, in sixty 10-megabyte files. They were produced by a combination of several of the best deterministic random number generators (RNG's), together with three sources of white noise, as well as black noise (from a rap music digital recording). My intent is to provide an unassailable source for those who absolutely positively have to have a large, reliable set of random numbers for serious simulation (Monte Carlo) studies. The CDROMS will be distributed free of charge to interested scientists (except for a shipping/handling charge of $186.47&emdash; whoops, just kidding, to get your attention as well as indicate exasperation with the usual shipping/handling ruse. However, there may be a true charge for shipping, probably around $5.)
CDROM online for ftp

Important

If you are interested in this CDROM, please send mail to George Marsaglia (geo@stat.fsu.edu ) with an appropriate subject heading.

Various Tests in Diehard

Some Good Random Number Generators

Papers relating to Diehard

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