Hawkynt

Mersenne Twister (MT19937)

MT19937 is a widely-used pseudo-random number generator with a period of 2^19937-1. It passes numerous statistical tests and is the default PRNG in many programming languages, though it is not cryptographically secure.

Properties

Property	Value
Category	Random Number Generators
Sub-category	Pseudo-Random Number Generator
Security status	🎓 Educational Only
Complexity	Intermediate
Inventor	Makoto Matsumoto and Takuji Nishimura
Year	1997
Origin	🇯🇵 Japan
Source	algorithms/random/mersenne-twister.js

Parameters

Parameter	Supported values
Seed sizes	4 bytes (32 bits)

Capabilities

Flag	Value
IsDeterministic	Yes
IsCryptographicallySecure	No

Security

Status: 🎓 Educational Only

No vulnerabilities are recorded for this implementation.

Documentation

• Original Paper: Mersenne Twister (ACM TOMACS 1998)
• MT19937ar: Improved Initialization (2002)
• Crypto++ Implementation
• Wikipedia: Mersenne Twister

References

• Reference Implementation (C code)
• C++11 std::mt19937 Documentation

Test vectors

3 vectors ship with this algorithm and run in the test suite. Byte values are hexadecimal.

Vector 1 — MT19937 with seed 5489 (default seed, first 10 outputs)

Field	Value
seed	71150000
outputSize	40
input	null
expected	5cbb91d0f69eae22eefae1e7791fc3d5 2c358220dfb707f80500d3e9e1af9538 ba4be2a12b09e44e

Vector 2 — MT19937 with seed 1 (common test seed, first 10 outputs)

Field	Value
seed	01000000
outputSize	40
input	null
expected	25f4c16aeb8047ff8c2f67b84814bcee ff7e070089c3cc20cbaa654d851ec1ff 4fcb9125c053703c

Vector 3 — MT19937 with seed 123456789 (validation test)

Field	Value
seed	15cd5b07
outputSize	20
input	null
expected	b8be67889c2e9bfd322dbd88d9175e035a117282

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