[Haskell-cafe] Lazy MWC Random?

Gregory Collins greg at gregorycollins.net
Wed Jan 29 07:56:04 UTC 2014


Try using unsafeInterleaveST?.


On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 7:08 PM, Sacha Sokoloski <sacha404 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Haskellers,
>
> I'm in a situation where I'd like to generate an infinite list of random
> elements (basically, I'm simulating stochastic systems). I feel like MWC
> Random is the fastest RNG available, but when I try to pull the infinite
> list out of RandST, it obviously doesn't halt, because ST is strict.
> Someone posted a way around this in this stack overflow thread:
>
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16248600/parallel-
> computations-with-fast-randomness-and-purity
>
> Which would fix my problem. My question is though, why isn't ST.Lazy
> included as a PrimMonad instance anyway? The best answer I can come up with
> is that, since evaluating the Generator is time dependent, it's best to
> make it strict to make sure that one's program isn't tapping into
> /dev/random at arbitrary times.
>
> In this way the best stackoverflow solution is quite good. It requires one
> to strictly generate a Seed (since that's the only way to do it), but then
> converts the ST Monad to the Lazy version to Lazify everything else.
> However, my understanding of PrimMonad is simply that it's a class of low
> level monads i.e. IO and ST, so if there's some deeper reason to this, it's
> beyond me.
>
> Another question that I'm puzzling over: In the stack overflow solution,
> they also make an effort to only have to generate the seed a single time.
> Is this important performance wise? What I suppose this must hinge upon, is
> whether in saving an ST s Gen to a Seed, the conversion from an immutable
> to mutable array requires a copy or not. Is that the full extent of the
> complexity of this? Is the stackoverflow solution ultimately the most
> efficient? Is using MWC Random to generate infinite lists and efficient
> solution anyway?
>
> Thanks for any insight,
>
>  - Sacha Sokoloski
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-- 
Gregory Collins <greg at gregorycollins.net>
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