The Mersenne Twister Generator Family

History

The Mersenne Twister was developed in 1997 by Makoto Matsumoto and Takuji Nishimura in an attempt to recify some issues with older PRNGs. Specifically, it has an absurdly large period of 2¹⁹⁹³⁷ - 1 results. This happens to be a Mersenne Prime, which is where the Mersenne Twister gets its name.

The "twist" in the Mersenne Twister is a four step tempering function, which uses bit shifting to "twist" a value around.

Tested Variants

MT19937
This is the traditional version of the Mersenne Twister.

TinyMT
A miniturized version of the Mersenne Twister, designed to work around the PRNG's large state requirements.