[Haskell-cafe] random-fu confusion

[James Andrew Cook]

A PureMT generator is immutable, so must be threaded through the monad in which you are sampling.  There are RandomSource instances provided for a few special cases, including "IORef PureMT" in the IO monad.  For example:

main = do
    mt <- newPureMT
    src <- newIORef mt
    flips <- runRVar (replicateM 20 flipCoin) src
    print flips

Alternatively, the functions in the module you mentioned can be used to define additional instances, such as:

instance MonadRandom (State PureMT) where
    supportedPrims _ _ = True
    getSupportedRandomPrim = getRandomPrimFromPureMTState

And RandomSource instances look almost the same.  See the Data.Random.Source.PureMT source for examples.  (I thought I had included this particular instance in the distribution but I apparently missed it.  The next release will probably include this as well as corresponding instances for the 'transformers' package, possibly separated out into 'random-fu-mtl' and 'random-fu-transformers' packages).

The "StdRandom" type is a convenient "RandomSource" designating this instance in the State PureMT monad.  Personally, I prefer to use the "sample" function for this purpose, as well as the "sampleFrom" function in place of runRVar/runRVarT.  GHCi does not display the "sample" functions' types properly - they are defined for RVarT as well as for all Distribution instances.

Sorry it took so long responding.

-- James

On Sep 2, 2010, at 10:01 AM, Alex Rozenshteyn wrote:

> I seem to be having confusion at the runRVar level of random-fu.
> 
> I can't figure out how to use the Data.Random.Source.PureMT module to get a meaningful random source (I can't get my code to type-check).
> 
> I wrote a [trivial] flipCoin function
> > flipCoin = uniform False True
> and am trying to fill in the final place of runRVar
> > :t runRVar (replicateM 20 flipCoin)
> runRVar (replicateM 20 flipCoin)
>   :: (RandomSource m s) => s -> m [Bool]
> 
> 
> -- 
>           Alex R
> 
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