No Arabic abstract
Linear pseudorandom number generators are very popular due to their high speed, to the ease with which generators with a sizable state space can be created, and to their provable theoretical properties. However, they suffer from linear artifacts which show as failures in linearity-related statistical tests such as the binary-rank and the linear-complexity test. In this paper, we give three new contributions. First, we introduce two new linear transformations that have been handcrafted to have good statistical properties and at the same time to be programmable very efficiently on superscalar processors, or even directly in hardware. Then, we describe a new test for Hamming-weight dependencies that is able to discover subtle, previously unknown biases in existing generators (in particular, in linear ones). Finally, we describe a number of scramblers, that is, nonlinear functions applied to the state array that reduce or delete the linear artifacts, and propose combinations of linear transformations and scramblers that give extremely fast pseudorandom generators of high quality. A novelty in our approach is that we use ideas from the theory of filtered linear-feedback shift register to prove some properties of our scramblers, rather than relying purely on heuristics. In the end, we provide simple, extremely fast generators that use a few hundred bits of memory, have provable properties and pass very strong statistical tests.
Marsaglia proposed recently xorshift generators as a class of very fast, good-quality pseudorandom number generators. Subsequent analysis by Panneton and LEcuyer has lowered the expectations raised by Marsaglias paper, showing several weaknesses of such generators, verified experimentally using the TestU01 suite. Nonetheless, many of the weaknesses of xorshift generators fade away if their result is scrambled by a non-linear operation (as originally suggested by Marsaglia). In this paper we explore the space of possible generators obtained by multiplying the result of a xorshift generator by a suitable constant. We sample generators at 100 equispaced points of their state space and obtain detailed statistics that lead us to choices of parameters that improve on the current ones. We then explore for the first time the space of high-dimensional xorshift generators, following another suggestion in Marsaglias paper, finding choices of parameters providing periods of length $2^{1024} - 1$ and $2^{4096} - 1$. The resulting generators are of extremely high quality, faster than current similar alternatives, and generate long-period sequences passing strong statistical tests using only eight logical operations, one addition and one multiplication by a constant.
xorshift* generators are a variant of Marsaglias xorshift generators that eliminate linear artifacts typical of generators based on $mathbf Z/2mathbf Z$-linear operations using multiplication by a suitable constant. Shortly after high-dimensional xorshift* generators were introduced, Saito and Matsumoto suggested a different way to eliminate linear artifacts based on addition in $mathbf Z/2^{32}mathbf Z$, leading to the XSadd generator. Starting from the observation that the lower bits of XSadd are very weak, as its reverse fails systematically several statistical tests, we explore xorshift+, a variant of XSadd using 64-bit operations, which leads, in small dimension, to extremely fast high-quality generators.
Congruential pseudorandom number generators rely on good multipliers, that is, integers that have good performance with respect to the spectral test. We provide lists of multipliers with a good lattice structure up to dimension eight and up to lag eight for generators with typical power-of-two moduli, analyzing in detail multipliers close to the square root of the modulus, whose product can be computed quickly.
The information geometry of the 2-manifold of gamma probability density functions provides a framework in which pseudorandom number generators may be evaluated using a neighbourhood of the curve of exponential density functions. The process is illustrated using the pseudorandom number generator in Mathematica. This methodology may be useful to add to the current family of test procedures in real applications to finite sampling data.
We show that quantum algorithms of time $T$ and space $Sge log T$ with unitary operations and intermediate measurements can be simulated by quantum algorithms of time $T cdot mathrm{poly} (S)$ and space $ {O}(Scdot log T)$ with unitary operations and without intermediate measurements. The best results prior to this work required either $Omega(T)$ space (by the deferred measurement principle) or $mathrm{poly}(2^S)$ time [FR21,GRZ21]. Our result is thus a time-efficient and space-efficient simulation of algorithms with unitary operations and intermediate measurements by algorithms with unitary operations and without intermediate measurements. To prove our result, we study pseudorandom generators for quantum space-bounded algorithms. We show that (an instance of) the INW pseudorandom generator for classical space-bounded algorithms [INW94] also fools quantum space-bounded algorithms. More precisely, we show that for quantum space-bounded algorithms that have access to a read-once tape consisting of random bits, the final state of the algorithm when the random bits are drawn from the uniform distribution is nearly identical to the final state when the random bits are drawn using the INW pseudorandom generator. This result applies to general quantum algorithms which can apply unitary operations, perform intermediate measurements and reset qubits.