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PCG (Permuted Congruential Generator)

PCG is a family of simple, fast, space-efficient, statistically excellent pseudorandom number generators developed by Melissa O’Neill. This implementation uses 128-bit state with RXS-M-XS permutation outputting 64-bit values, combining a linear congruential generator with output mixing for excellent statistical properties.

Properties

Property	Value
Category	Random Number Generators
Sub-category	Pseudorandom Number Generator
Security status	🎓 Educational Only
Complexity	Intermediate
Inventor	Melissa E. O’Neill
Year	2014
Origin	🇺🇸 United States
Source	algorithms/random/pcg.js

Parameters

Parameter	Supported values
Seed sizes	8 bytes (64 bits) to 16 bytes (128 bits) in steps of 8 bytes

Capabilities

Flag	Value
IsDeterministic	Yes
IsCryptographicallySecure	No

Security

Status: 🎓 Educational Only

No vulnerabilities are recorded for this implementation.

Documentation

• Official PCG Website
• Original Paper: PCG: A Family of Simple Fast Space-Efficient Statistically Good Algorithms for Random Number Generation
• Wikipedia: Permuted Congruential Generator

References

• PCG C Implementation (Official)
• PCG C++ Implementation (Official)
• Rosetta Code: PCG32

Test vectors

1 vector ship with this algorithm and run in the test suite. Byte values are hexadecimal.

Vector 1 — PCG64 seed=0, first 9 x 64-bit outputs (Abseil golden vector)

Field	Value
seed	0000000000000000
outputSize	72
input	null
expected	01070196e695f8f1703ec840c59f4493 e54954914b3a44fa96130ff204b9285e 7d9fdef535ceb21a666feed42e1219a0 981f685721c8326fad80710d6eab4dda e202c480b037a029

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